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MEDITATIONS 


ON 


THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY, 


AND ON .- 


THE RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 


By M G@UIZOT 


TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH, UNDER THE SUPERINTENDENCE: 
OF THE AUTHOR. 


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CHARLES SCRIBNER & C O4 
124 GRAND-STREEY, 


1865. 


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PREFACE. 


a 

Dortve the last nineteen centuries Christian- 
ity has been often assailed, and has successfully 
resisted every attack. Of these attacks some 
have been more violent, but none more serious 
than that of which it is, in these days, the 
object. 

For eighteen hundred years Christians were 
in turn persecutors and persecuted ; Christians 
persecuted as Christians, Christians persecutors 
of every one who was not Christian—Christians 
mutually persecuting each other. This persecu- 
tion varied, it is true, in degree of cruelty with 
the age and the country, as it also did in the 
degree of inflexibility evinced and success at- 
tained in the prosecution of its object; but 


whatever the diversity of State, Church, or pun- 


4 + PREFACE. 


ishment, whatever the degree of severity or 
laxity in the application of the principle, this 
principle was ever the same. After having had 
to endure proscription and martyrdom under 
the imperial government of Paganism, the 
Christian religion lived, in its turn, under the 
guard of the civil law, defended by the arms of 
secular power. 

In these days it exists in the very presence 
of liberty. It has to deal with free thought, 
with free discussion. It is called upon to de- 
fend, to guard itself, to prove incessantly and. 
against every comer its moral and _ historical 
veracity, to vindicate its claims upon man’s 
intelligence and man’s soul. ‘Roman Catholics, 
Protestants or Jews, Christians or philosophers, 
all, at least in our country, are sheltered from 
every persecution; for no one without incurring 
the risk of ridicule could characterize as perse- 
cution the sacrifices or the inconveniences to 
which the expression of his opinion may occa- 


sionally subject him. To every man such 


PREFAOE. » 5 


expression of opinion is permitted, and can 
never lead to the forfeiture, on the part of any 
single individual, of any of his political rights 
or privileges. Religious liberty, that is to say, 
the liberty of believing—of believing differently 
or of disbelieving—may be but imperfectly 
accepted and guaranteed as a principle in cer-— 
tain states; but it still is evident that it is 
becoming so every day more and more, and 
that it will eventually become the common law 
of the civilized world. 

One of the circumstances that render this 
fact pregnant with importance is, that it does 
not stand isolated, but holds its place in the 
great intellectual and social revolution, which, 
after the fermentation and the preparation of 
centuries, has broken out and is in course of 
accomplishment in our own days. The scien- 
tific spirit, the preponderance of the democratic 
principle, and that of political liberty, are the 
essential characteristics and invincible tenden- 


cies of this revolution. These new forces may 


6 PREFACE. 


fall into enormous errors, and commit enormous 
faults, the penalty for which they will ever 
dearly pay; still they are definitively installed 
in modern society ; the sciences will continue to 
develop themselves in its bosom in the full 
independence of their methods and of their 
results; the democracy will establish itself in 
the positions which it has conquered, and on 
the ground which has been opened to it; polit- 
ical liberty in the midst of its storms and its 
disappointments will still, sooner or later, cause 
itself to be accepted as the necessary guarantee 
for all the acquisitions and all the progress 
possible in society, ‘These are the grand pre- 
dominant facts to which all public institutions 
will now have to adapt themselves, and with 
which all authority, whose action is upon the 
mind, requires to live at peace, 

Christianity also must submit to the same 
tests and trials. As it has surmounted all 
others, so also will it surmount this ; its essence 


and origin would not be divine did they not 


PREFACE. “4 


permit it to adapt itself to all the different 
forms of human institutions, to serve them now 
as a guide, now as a support in their vicissitudes 
whether of adversity or prosperity. It is, how- 
ever, of the most serious importance for Chris- 
tians not to deceive themselves, either as to the 
nature of the struggle which they will have to 
Sustain, or as to its perils and the legitimate 
arms which they may use to combat them. The 
attack directed against the Christian religion is 
one hotly carried on, now with a brutal fanat- 
icism, now with a dextrous learning; at one 
time with the appeal to sincere convictions, and 
at another invoking the worst passions; some 
contest Christianity as false, others reject it as 
too exacting and imposing too much restraint ; 
the greater part apprehend it as tyranny. In- 
justice and suffering are not so soon forgotten ; 
nor does one readily recover from the effect of 
terror. The memory of religious persecutions 
still lives, and this it is that maintains, in mul- 


titudes, whose opinions vacillate, aversion, prej- 


8 PREFACE. 


udice, and a lively sentiment of alarm. Chris- 
tians on their side are loth to recognize and 
accommodate themselves to the new order of 
society ; every moment they are shocked, uri- 
tated, terrified by the ideas and language to 
which that society gives utterance. Men do 
not so readily pass from a state of privilege to 
one of community of rights—from a state of do- 
minion to one of liberty; they do not resign 
themselves without a struggle to the audacious 
obstinacy of contradiction, to the daily neces- 
sity of resisting and conquering. Government 
according to principles of liberty is still more 
influenced by passion, and entails a necessity of 
still more exertion in the sphere of religion 
than of civil politics: believers find it still more 
difficult to support incredulity than govern- 
ments to bear with oppositions; and, neverthe- 
less, these themselves are forced to do so, and 
can only find in free discussion and in the full 
exercise of their peculiar liberties the force 


which they require to rise above their perilous 


PREFACE. 9 


condition, and reduce—not to silence, for that 


is impossible, but to an idle warfare—their 
inveterate enemies. 
| To leave that civil society, in which the dif. 
ferent sects of religion are nowadays compelled 
to live in peace and side by side, and to enter 
religious society itself, the Christian Church 
of our days: what is its actual position with 
respect to these grand questions which it has to 
discuss with the spirit of human liberty and 
audacity? Does it comprehend properly, does 
it suitably carry on the warfare in which 
it is engaged? Does it tend in its proceed- 
ings to a re-establishment of a real peace, and 
active harmonious relations between itself and 
that general society in the midst of which 
it is living’ 

I say Christian Church. It is, in effect, the 
whole Church of Christ, and not such or such a 
Church that is in these days attacked, and vital- 
ly attacked. When men deny the supernatural 


world, the inspiration of the Scriptures, and 


10 PREFACE. 


the divinity of Jesus Christ, they really assail 
the whole body of Christians—Romanists, Prot- 
estants, or Greeks: they are virtually destroy- 
ing the foundations of faith in all the belief of 
Christians, whatever their particular difference 
of religious opinion or forms of ecclesiastical 
government. It is by faith that all Christian 
Churches live; there is no form of government, 
monarchical or republican, concentrated or dif- 

fused, that suffices to maintain a Church ; there ) 
is no authority so strong, no liberty so broad, 
as to be able in a religious society to dispense 
with the necessity of faith. For what is it that 
unites in a Church if it is not faith? Faith 1s 
the bond of souls. When, then, the founda- 
tions of their common faith are attacked, the 
differences existing between Christian Churches 
upon special questions, or the diversities of 
their organization or government, become sec- 
ondary interests; it is from a common peril 
that they have’to defend themselves; or they 


must reconcile themselves to see dried up the 


PREFACE. - 


common source from which they all derive 
sustenance and life. 

I fear that the sentiment of this common 
peril is not, in all the Christian Churches, as 
clear and well-defined, as deep and predomi- 
nant, as their common safety requires. In pres- 
ence of similar questions everywhere varied, of 
identical attacks everywhere directed against 
the vital facts and dogmas of Christianity, I 
dread Christians of the different communions 
not concentrating all af their forces upon the 
mighty struggles in which they are, all, to 
engage. My dread, however, is unattended by 
astonishment. Although the danger is the 
_ same for all, the traditional opinions and habits, 
and consequently the actual dispositions, are 
very different. Many Romanists feel the per- 
suasion that faith would be saved were they 
only delivered from liberty of thought. Many 
Protestants believe that they are but employ- 
ing their right of free examination, and do not 


lose their title to be regarded as Christians, 


12 PREFACE. 


when they are in effect abandoning the founda- 
tions and withdrawing from the source of faith. 
Roman Catholicism has not sufficient reliance 
on its roots, and respects too much its branches ; 
no tree exists that does not need culture and 
clearing in accordance with climate and season, 
if it is expected to continue to bear always good 
fruit; but the roots should be especially de- 
fended from every attack. Protestantism is too 
forgetful that it also has roots from which it 
cannot be separated without perishing, and that 
religion is not what an annual is in vegetation: 
a plant that men cultivate and renew at their 
pleasure. While the Romanists dread freedom 
of thought too much, the Protestants on their 
side have too great a fear of authority. Some 
believe that inasmuch as religious faith has firm 
and fixed points, movement and progress are 
incompatible with religious society; others 
affirm that a religious society can never have 
fixed points, and that religion consists in relig- 


sous sentiment and individual belief. W hat 


Le ee 


PREFACE. LS 


would have become of Christianity, had it from 
its birth been condemned to the immobility 
which the former recommend; and what would 
become of it at the present day, were it surren- 
dered, as the latter would have it, to the caprice 
of every mind, and the wind of every day. 
Happily, God permits not that, at this crisis, 
the true principles and the true interests of the 
Christian religion should remain without sufii- 
cient defenders. Romanists there are, who un- 
derstand their age and the new constitution of 
society, who accept frankly its liberty, religious 
and politic: it is precisely they who have most 
boldly testified their attachment to the faith of 
Rome, who have claimed with most ardor the 
essential liberties of their Church, and defended 
with most energy the rights of its chief. Nor 
are Protestants wanting who have used with the 
most untiring zeal all the liberty acquired in 
our days by Protestantism; they have founded 
all those associations and originated all those 


undertakings which have manifested the vital 


14 PREFACE. 


energy and extended the action of the Protest- 
* ant Church; they have demanded and they 
continue to demand, for this Church, the re- 
establishment of its synods, that is to say, its 
religious autonomy. Among these Protestants, 
where men have appeared who have not found 
in the Protestant Church as by law established 


the entire satisfaction of their convictions, they _ 


have felt no hesitation to separate from it and 
to found, with their own means alone, independ- 
ent Churches. It may be affirmed also of the 
Protestants that they have most largely put in 
practice all the rights and all the liberties of 
Protestantism, in the internal ordeal through 
which Christianity is at present passing; it 
is precisely they who assert most loudly the 
dogmas of the Christian faith, and maintain 
most inflexibly the authoritative rights estab- 
lished by law in the bosém of their Church. 
The Liberal Romanists of the present day are 
the most zealous defenders of the fundamental 


traditions and institutions of Catholicism. The 


ee eS — 


PREFACE. 15 


Protestants who have been the most active 
during the last half century in the exercise of — 
the liberties of Protestantism are the firmest 
maintainers of its doctrines and of its vital 
rules. 

Humanly speaking, it is upon the influence 
exercised and to be exercised in their respect- 
ive Churches and on the public, by these two 
classes of Christians, that depends the peaceable 
issue of the crisis through which Christianity is 
in these days passing. Our society is, doubt- 
less, far from meriting the title of a Christian 
one; still it cannot be characterized as anti- 
christian ; considered as one vast whole, it has 
no hostile or general prejudice against the 
Christian religion: it maintains the habits, the 
instincts, I would willingly add the longings, of 
Christians; it is conscious that Christian faith 
and ordinance serve powerfully its interests 
with respect to order and peace; the fanatical 
opponents of Christianity exercise upon it far 


more disquieting than seductive influences, for 


16 PREFACE. 


it has already had experience of their empire; 
and where society appears to offer a silent 
acquiescence, or even to pride itself upon them, 
still at bottom it dreads their progress. 

Such being the state of the case, and such 
the constitution of society, how are we to draw 
men away from their apathy and their igno- 
rance in matters of religion? How lead them 
back to Christianity? They alone can accom- 
plish this object who in their defense and 
propagation of the religion of Jesus shall not 
wound society itself in the ideas, sentiments, 
rights, and interests which have at present 
rooted themselves in its very life and energies. 
Like religion, modern society has also its fixed 
points and its invincible tendencies: it can 
never be set on terms of harmony with the 
former unless by the concurring action of men 
who have with each of them a genuine and 
deep sentiment of sympathy. Since the Chris- 
tian religion lives in these times confronting 


civil liberty, those alone can be efficient cham- 


oat 


PREFACE, Le 


_ pions of religion who at the same time profess 


fully the Christian faith and accept with sin- 
cerity the tests of liberty. 

But in pursuing their pious and salutary 
enterprise, let not these liberal Christians flat- 
ter themselves with the probability of any 
prompt or complete success. Maintain and 
propagate the Christian faith they may, but 
they will never be able in the bosom of society 
to get rid either of incredulity or doubt; even 
while combating them they must learn to 
endure their presence; in institutions of free- 
dom there is essentially an intermixture of 
good and evil, of truth and error; contrary 
ideas and dispositions produce and develop 
themselves in it simultaneously. “Think not 
that I am come to send peace on earth: I came 
not,” said Jesus to his apostles, “to send peace, 
but a sword.” Matt. x, 34. The sword of 
Jesus Christ, that is, Christianity at war with 
human error and shortcomings; a victory, 


still a victory ever incomplete in an inces- 
2 


18 PREFACE. 


sant struggle—that is the condition to which 
those must submit with resignation who, in 
the bosom of liberty, defend the truth of 
Christianity. 

Were these valiant and intelligent cham- 
pions of the faith of Jesus not adopted and 
accredited as such in the Churches to which 
they belong; did the Church of Rome furnish 
ground for thinking her essentially hostile to 
the fundamental principles and rights of mod- 
ern society, and that she only tolerates them 
as Moses tolerated divorce among the Jews, 
“because of the hardness of their heart ;” and, 
on the other hand, did the rejecters of the 
supernatural, of the inspiration of the Scrip- 
tures, and of the divinity of Jesus Christ, pre- 
dominate in the bosom of Protestantism; and 
finally, did the latter then become naught but 
a hesitating system of philosophy; if all these 
deplorable things were to be realized, I am far 
from thinking that, owing to such faults, such 


disasters, the religion of Christ would vanish © 


aie 19 
from the world and definitively withdraw from 
men its light and its support. The destinies of 
religion are far above human errors; but still, 
beyond all doubt, for mankind to be turned 
back from them, and for the light to return to 
their soul and harmony to modern society, there 
would have again to burst out in the human 
soul and in society one of those immense 
troubles, one of those revolutionary whirlwinds, 
whose evils man is compelled actually to un- 
dergo before he can derive benefit from its 
lessons. 

On the point of addressing myself to ques- 
tions more profound and of a less transitory 
nature, I content myself with having merely 
indicated what I think of the crisis that agitates 
Christendom at the present day, as also of its 
main cause, its perils, and the chances, io or 
bad, that it holds out for the future. In the 
work of which the first part is now befahe the 
public, I omit all the circumstantial facts and 


* details, as well as. the discussions that grow out 


20 ew 

of them, and it is only with the Christian relig- 
ion as it is in itself, with its fundamental belief 
and its reasonableness, that I occupy myself; it 
has been my purpose to illustrate the truth of 
Christianity by contrasting it with the systems 
and the doubts that men set in array against it. 
It is my intention to avoid all direct and per- 
sonal polemics; express reference to individuals 
embarrasses and envenoms all questions in con- 
troversy, and gives rise to ill-judged deference 
or unjust invective, two descriptions of falsity 
for which alike I feel no sympathy. Let me 
have then for adversaries ideas alone; and what- 
ever these may be, I admit beforehand the 
possibility of sincerity on the part of those that 
prefer them. Without this admission all seri- 
ous discussion is out of the question; and nei- 
ther the intellectual enormity of the error, nor 
its awful practical consequences, positively pre- 
cludes sincerity on the part of him that promul- 
gates it. The mind of man is still more easily 


led astray than his heart, and is still more - 


PREFACE. 21 


egotistical; after having once conceived and 
expressed an idea, it attaches itself to it as to its 
own offspring, takes a pride in imprisoning 
itself in it, as if it were so taking possession of 
the pure and entire truth. 

These Meditations will be divided into four 
series. In the first, which forms this volume, I 
explain and establish what constitutes, in my 
opinion, the essence of the Christian religion ; 
that is to say, what those natural problems are 
that correspond with the fundamental dogmas 
that offer their solution, the supernatural facts 
upon which these same dogmas repose: Crea- 
tion, Revelation, the Inspiration of the Scrip- 
tures, God according to the biblical account, 
and Jesus according to the Gospel narrative. 
Next to the essence of the Christian religion 
comes its history ; and this will be the subject 
of a second series of Meditations, in which I 
shall examine the authenticity of the Scriptures, 
the primary causes of the foundation of Chris- 


tianity, Christian Faith, as it has always existed 


292 PREFACE. 


throughout its different ages, and in spite of all 
its vicissitudes; the great religious crisis in the 
sixteenth century which divided the Church 
and Europe between Roman Catholicism and 
Protestantism; finally, those different anti- 
christian crises, which at different epochs and 
in different countries have set in question and 
imperiled Christianity itself, but which dangers 
it has ever surmounted. The third Meditation 
will be consecrated to the study of the actual 
state of the Christian religion, its internal and 
external condition. I shall retrace the regen- 
eration of Christianity which occurred among 
us at the commencement of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, both in the Church of Rome and in the 
Protestant Churches; the impulse imparted to 
it at the same epoch by the Spiritualistic Phi- 
losophy that then began again to flourish, and 
the movement in the contrary direction which 
showed itself very remarkably soon afterward 
in the resurrection of Materialism, of Pantheism, 


2 
of Skepticism, and in works of historical crit- 


PREFACE. 23 


icism. I shall attempt to determine the idea, 
and consequently, in my opinion, the funda-— 
mental error of these different systems, the 
avowed and active enemies of Christianity. 
Finally, in the fourth series of these Meditations 
I shall endeavor to discriminate and to char- 
acterize the future destiny of the Christian 
religion, and to indicate by what course it is 
-ealled upon to conquer. completely and to sway 
morally this little corner of the universe termed 
by us our earth, in which unfold themselves 
the designs and power of God, just as, doubt- 
less, they do in an infinity of worlds unknown 
to us. 

I have passed thirty-five years of my life in 
struggling, on a bustling arena, for the estab- 
lishment of political liberty and the main- 
tenance of order as established by law. I have 
learned, in the labors and trials of this strug- 
gle, the real worth of Christian faith and of 
Christian liberty. God permits me, in the re- 


pose of my retreat, to consecrate to their 


24 PREFACE. 


cause what remains to me of life and of 
strength. It is the most salutary favor and | 
the greatest honor that I can receive from his 


goodness. 
GUIZOT. 


Vat-RicuEr, June, 1864. 


CON TENTS. 


I. NATURAL PROBLEMS......... sibel data Swan dae Laveen ote "97 

II. CurisTIan Doemas CR Wlal aw charenaie ota taps dane Oia eet Gal 37 
Til) THE, SUPRENATURAD Ys givsdees oot evdee anno un as 112 
LV. Tet Liners. oF; SCTENOR oS OU S Yiu e eos aaeee cote 138 
Ni REVELATIONS 3.4) Ss iach nace adacte we came ame 163 
VI. Tue INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES..... Meer i, 172 
VIL. Gor ACCORDING TO THE BIBLE.................. 189 
VIII. Jesus CHRIST ACCORDING TO THE GOSPEL........ *268 
PORE ete ss vs Me a sigad ay cian ek aR Ue eras he xe Midas 341 


ied 
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MEDITATIONS 


ON THE ESSENCE OF 


THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


FIRST MEDITATION. 


NATURAL PROBLEMS. 


From the very origin of the human race, 
wherever man has existed, or still exists, certain 
questions have peculiarly and irresistibly fixed 
his attention, and they continue to do so at the 
present hour. This arises not alone from a 
feeling of natural curiosity, or the ardent thirst 
for knowledge, but from a deeper and more pow- 
erful motive. The destiny of man is intimate- 


ly involved in these questions; they contain the 


28 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


secret not only of all that he sees around him, 
but of his own being; and when he aspires to 
solve them, it is not merely because he desires 
to understand the spectacle of which he is a 
beholder, but because he feels, and is conscious 
of being himself an actor in the great drama of 
existence, and because he seeks to ascertain his 
own part there, and comprehend his own destiny. 
His present conduct and his future lot are as 
much at issue as the satisfaction of his thought. 
These great problems are, for man, not questions 
of science, but questions of life: in considering 
them he feels himself compelled to say with 
Hamlet, “To be or not to be, that is the 
question.” 

Whence does the world proceed, and whence 
does man appear in the midst of it? What is 
the origin of each, and whither does each tend ? 
What are their beginning and their end? Laws 
there are which govern them: is there a legis- 
lator? Under the empire of these laws, man 


feels and calls himself free: is he so in reality ? 


FIRST MEDITATION. 29 


How is his liberty compatible with the laws 
which govern him and the world? Is he a 
passive instrument of fate, or a responsible 
agent? What are the ties and relations which 
connect him with the Legislator of the world ? 

The world and man himself present a strange 
and painful spectacle. Good and evil, both 
moral and physical, order and disorder, joy and 
sorrow, are here intimately blended and yet in 
continual antagonism. Whence come this com- 
mingling and this strife? Is good or is evil 
the condition and the law of man and of the 
world? If good, how then has evil found ad- 
mission? Wherefore suffering and death? Why 
this moral disorder? the calamities which so 
frequently befall the good, and the prosperity, 
so abhorrent to our feelings, which attends the 
wicked? Is this the normal and definitive state 
of man and of the world? 

Man is conscious that he is at the same time 
great and little, strong and feeble, powerful and 


impotent. He finds in himself matter for admi- 


30 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


ration and for love, and yet he suffices not to 
himself in any respect; he seeks an aid, a sup- 
port, beyond and above himself: he asks, he 
invokes, he prays. What mean these inward 
disquietudes, these alternate impulses of pride 
and weakness? Have they, or not, a meaning 
and an object? Why prayer ? 

Such are the natural problems, now dimly 
felt, now clearly defined, which in all ages and 
among all nations, in every form and in every 
degree of civilization, by instinct or by reflection, 
have arisen, and still arise, in the human mind. 
J indicate only the greatest, the most apparent: 
I might recall many others which are connected 
with them. 

Not only are those problems natural to man ; 
they appertain to him alone; they are his pecul- 
iar privilege. Man alone, among all creatures 
known to us, perceives and states them, and feels 
himself imperiously called upon to solve them. 
I borrow the following admirable observations 


from M. de Chateaubriand: “‘ Why does not the 


FIRST MEDITATION. - $F 


ox as Ido? It can lie down upon the grass, 
raise its head toward heaven, and in its lowings 
call upon that unknown Being who fills this 
immensity of space. But no: content with the 
turf on which it tramples, it interrogates not 
those suns in the firmament above, which are the 
grand evidence of the existence of God. Ani- 
mals are not troubled with those hopes which 
fill the heart of man; the spot on which they 
tread yields them all the happiness of which 
they are susceptible; a little grass satisfies the 
sheep ; a little blood gluts the tiger. The only 
creature that looks beyond himself, and is not 
all in all to himself, is man.”* 

From these problems, natural and peculiar to 
man, all religions have sprung. The object of 
them all is to satisfy man’s thirst for their solu- 
tion. As these problems are the source of relig- 
ion, the solutions they receive are its substance 
and foundation. There prevails in our days a very 
general tendency to regard religion as consisting 


* Génie du Christianisme, vol. i, p. 208, edit. of 1831. 


32 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


essentially—I might say wholly—in religious 
sentiment, in those lofty and vague aspirations 
which are termed the poetry of the soul, beyond 
“and above the realities of life. Through the 
religious sentiment, the soul enters into relation 
with the divine order of things; and this rela- 
tion, of a wholly personal and intimate charac- 
ter, independent of all positive dogma, of any 
organized Church, is deemed to be all-sufficient 
for man, the true and needful religion. 
Unquestionably the religious sentiment, the 
intimate and personal relation of the soul with 
the divine order, is essential and necessary to 
religion; but religion is more than this—much 
more. The human soul is not to be divided 
and restricted to certain faculties selected and 
exalted, while the rest are condemned to slum- 
ber. Man is not a mere sensitive and poetic 
being, aspiring to rise above the present and 
material world by love and imagination: he 
not only feels, but he thinks; he requires to 


know and believe as well as love; it is not 


= 
« 


FIRST MEDITATION. 33 


, 


enough that his soul should be capable of emo- 
tion and aspiration; he requires that it should 


be fixed, and rest upon convictions in harmony 


with his emotions. This it is that man seeks — 


in religion; he requires something more than a 
pure and noble rapture; he requires enlighten- 
ment, as well as sympathy. But if the moral 
problems that beset his thought are not solved, 
what he experiences may be poetry—it is not 
religion. 

I cannot contemplate unmoved the troubles 
of men of lofty minds, seeking in the religious 
sentiment alone a refuge against doubt and 
impiety. It is well to preserve, in the ship- 
wreck of faith and the chaos of thought, the 
great instincts of our nature, and not to lose 
sight of the sublime requirements which remain 
unsatisfied. I know not to what extent men of 
eminent minds may thus compensate, by their 
sincerity and fervor of sentiment, for the void 
in their belief; but let them not deceive them- 


selves; barren aspirations and specious doubts 
3 


eS 4 


% 


34 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


satisfy a man as little as to his future spiritual 
interests as with respect to his condition in the 
present life; the natural problems to which I 
have alluded will ever be the great weight 
pressing upon the soul, and religious sentiment 
will never alone suffice to be the religion of 
‘mankind. 

Besides this apotheosis of religious sentiment, 
some at the present day have essayed a differ- 
ent, a more serious and more daring theory. 
Far from sounding the natural problems to 
which religions correspond, schools of philoso- 
phy, occupying a prominent intellectual posi- 
tion—the Pantheistic School, and the so-called 
Positive School—suppress and deny them alto- 
gether. In their view the world has existed, 


of itself, from all eternity, as have the laws also 


by which it is sustained and developed. In 


their elementary principles, and taken alto- 
gether, all things have ever been what they 
now are, and what they will ever continue to 


be. There is no mystery in this universe ; 


% 


FIRST MEDITATION. 35 


there exist only facts and laws, naturally and 
necessarily linked together; and these furnish 
the field for human science, which, although 
incomplete, is yet indefinitely progressive in its 
power as well as in its operations. ’ 

According to these views Divine Providence 
and human liberty, the origin of evil, the com- 
mingling and the se of good and evil in the 
world, and in man, the imperfection of the 
present order of things, and the destiny of 
man, the prospect of the re-establishment of 
order in the future; these are all mere dreams, 
freaks of man’s thought: no such questions 
indeed exist, inasmuch as the world is eternal, 
it is in its actual state complete, normal, and 
definitive, though at the same time progressive. 
The remedy for the moral and physical evils 
which afflict mankind must then be sought, not 
in any power superior to the world, but simply 
in the progress of the sciences and the advance 
of human enlightenment. 


I shall not here discuss this system ; I do not 


36 _ THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


ee % 


even qualify it by its true name; I merely re- 
capitulate its tenets. But at the first and sim- 
ple aspect what contempt does it manifest of 
the spontaneous and universal instincts of man! 
What heedlessness of the facts which fill and 
never cease to characterize the universal history 
of the human race! 

Nevertheless to this we are come: not a 
solution, but the negation of the natural prob- 
lems, which irresistibly occupy the human soul, 
is presented to man for his full satisfaction and 
repose. Let him follow the mathematical or 
physical sciences; let him be a mechanician, 
chemist, critic, novelist, or poet; but let him 
not enter upon what is termed the sphere of 
religious and theological inquiry: here are no 
real questions to solve, naught to investigate, 
nothing to do, nothing to expect—absolutely 
nothing. 


SECOND MEDITATION. 


» 


CHRISTIAN DOGMAS. 
Tue Christian ee knows man Battok and 


treats man better: it has other answers to his 
questions; and it is Pewee the absolute nega- 
tion of the problems of religion and the Chris- 
tian solution of these problems that the discus- 
sion lies at the present day. 

Some words there are which we now regard 
with distrust and alarm: we suspect their 
masking illegitimate pretensions and tyranny. 
Such, in our days, has been the lot of the word 
dogma. To many this word imparts an im- 
perious necessity to believe, at once offending 
and disquieting. Singular contrast! On all 
sides we seek for principles, and we take alarm 


at dogmas. 


38 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


This sentiment, however absurd in itself, is in 
no way strange. Christian dogmas have served 
as motive and pretext for so much iniquity, so 
many acts of oppression and cruelty, that their 
very name has become tainted and suspected. 
The word bears the penalty of the reminis- 
cences which it awakens, and justly. All 
attacks upon the liberty of conscience, all em- 
ployment of force to extirpate or to impose 
religious belief is, and ever has been, an iniqui- 
tous and tyrannical act. All powers, all par- 
ties, all Churches have held such acts to be not 
only permissible, but enjoined by the Divine 
law. All have deemed it not merely their right, 
but their duty to prevent and to punish by law 
and human force error in matters of religion. 
They may all allege, in excuse, the sincerity of 
their belief in the legitimacy of this usurpation. 
The usurpation is not the less enormous and 
fatal, and perhaps indeed it is, of all human 
usurpations, the one which has inflicted on men 


the most odious torments and the grossest errors. 


SECOND MEDITATION. 39 


It will constitute the glory of our time to have 
discarded this pretension; nevertheless it yet 
exists, with persistency, in certain states, in cer- 
tain laws, in certain recesses of the human soul 
and of Christian society; and there is, and ever 
will be, need to watch and to combat it, to 
render its banishment unconditional and with- 
out appeal. Subdued, however, it is: civil 
~ freedom in matters of faith and religious life 
has become a fundamental principle of civiliza- 
tion and of law. These questions, affecting the 
relations of man to God, are no longer dis- 
cussed or adjusted in the arena and by a re- 
course to the hand of political and executive 
power; but they are transported to the sphere 
of the intellect, and left to the uncontrolled 
working of the mind itself. 

But again, in this sphere of the intellect, 
these questions still start up and call loudly 
for their peculiar solution, that is, for the fun- 
damental facts and ideas, the principles in effect 


which their nature requires. The Christian 


- 
bo) 


i 
* 


40 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


religion has its own principles, which constitute 
. the rational basis of the faith it inculcates and 
the life which it enjoins. These are termed its 
dogmas. The Christian dogmas are the princi- 
ples of the Christian religion, and the Christian 
solutions of the problems of natural religion. 

Let men of a serious mind, who have not 
entirely rejected the Christian religion, and 
who still admire it, while denying its funda- 
mental dogmas, beware of this: the flowers 
whose perfume captivates them will quickly 
fade, the fruits they delight in will soon cease 
to grow when the ax shall have been applied 
to the roots of the tree that bears them. 

For myself, arrived at the term of a long 
life, one of labor, of reflection, and of trials—of 
trials in thought as well as in action—I am 
convinced that the Christian dogmas are the 
legimate and satisfactory solutions of those 
religious problems which, as I have said, nature 
suggests and man carries in his own breast, 
and from which he cannot escape. 


¥ 


-~. 


SECOND MEDITATION. | 41 


I beg, at the outset, theologians, whether 
Catholic or Protestant, to pardon me. [ have 
no design to excite or to explain, or to main- 
tain, all the various doctrinal points, all the © 
articles of faith, which have been included 
in the term of Christian dogmas. During 
eighteen centuries Christian theology has very 
often ventured to advance out of and beyond 
the limits of the Christian religion: man has 
confounded his own labors with the work of 
God. It is the natural consequence of the 
union of human activity and human imper- 
fection. This same result may be traced 
throughout the history of the world, especially 
in the history of the society and religion 
upon which God has grafted the Christian 
religion. 

At the time when God raised up Jesus Christ 
among the Jews, the faith and the law of the 
Jews were no longer solely and purely the faith 
and law which God had given to them by 
Moses. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, and 

ev 


* 


42 itt CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

many others, had essentially modified, enlarged, 
and altered both. Christianity too has had its 
Pharisees and its Sadducees; in its turn it has 
been made to feel the workings of human 
thought and the influence of human passions 
on its divine revelation. I cannot recognize, in 
all the uncertain fruits of these labors, the 
claim to the title of Christian dogmas. Never- 
theless I have no intention here to specify par- 
ticularly and to combat such tenets in the 
Church and in Christian theology as I can 
neither accept nor defend. It is not for me— 
and I venture to say, it is not for any Chris- 
tian—to scan critically the interior of the 
edifice at a moment when its foundations are 
ardently attacked. Far rather I prefer to rally 
in a common defense all who abide within its 
walls. Ishall here allude only to the dogmas 
common to them all, which I sum up in these 
terms: The Creation, Providence, Original Sin, 
the Incarnation, and the Redemption. These 
constitute the essence of the Christian religion, 


a 


sy" a oF 
; - 
S. 
thy 


SECOND MEDITATION. 43 


and all who believe in these dogmas I hold to 
be Christians. ' 

One leading and common characteristic in 
these dogmas strikes me at the outset: they 
deal frankly with the religious problems natural 
to and inherent in man, and offer at once the 
solution. The dogma of Creation attests the 
existence of God, as Creator and Legislator, 
and it attests also the link which unites man 
with God. ‘The dogma of Providence explains 
and justifies prayer, that instinctive recourse 
of man to the living God, to that supreme 
Power which is ever present with him in life, 
and which influences his destiny. The dogma 
of Original Sin accounts for the presence of 
evil and disorder in mankind and in the world. 
The dogmas of the Incarnation and of Redemp- 
tion rescue man from the consequences of evil, 
and open to him a prospect in another life of the 
re-establishment of order. Unquestionably the 
system is grand, complete, well connected, and 


forcible: it answers to the requirements of the 


44 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


human soul, removes the burden which op- 
presses it, imparts the strength which it needs, 
and the satisfaction to which it aspires. Has 
it a rightful claim to all this power? Is its 
influence legitimate, as well as efficacious ? 

In my own mind I have borne the burden 
of the objections to the Christian system, and 
to each of its essential dogmas; I have expe- 
rienced the anxieties of doubt. I shall state 
how I have escaped from doubt, and the 
ground upon which my convictions have been 
founded. 


I. CREATION. 


THE only serious opponents of the dogma of 
the Creation are those who maintain that the 
universe, the earth, the man upon the earth, 
have existed from all eternity, and, collectively, 
in the state in which they now are. No one, 
however, can hold this language, to which facts 


are invincibly opposed. How many ages man 


SECOND MEDITATION. 45 


has existed on the earth is a question that has 
been largely discussed, and is still under dis- 
cussion. The inquiry in no way affects the 
dogma of the Creation itself: it is a certain 
and recognized fact, that man has not always 
existed on the earth, and that the earth has 
for long periods undergone different changes 
incompatible with man’s existence. Man, there- 
fore, had a beginning: man has come upon the 
earth. How has he come there? 

Here the opponents of the dogma of creation 
are divided ; some uphold the theory of spon- 
taneous generation, others, the transformation 
of species. According to one party, matter 
possesses, under certain circumstances and by 
the simple development of its own proper 
power, the faculty of creating animated beings. 
According to others, the different species of 
animated beings which still exist, or have ex- 
isted at various epochs and in the different con- 
ditions of the earth, are derived from a small 


number of primitive types which have pos- 


46 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


sessed, through the lapse of millions and thou- 
sands of millions of ages, the power of develop- 
ing and perfecting themselves so as to gain ad- 
_ mission, through transformation, into higher 
species. Hence they conclude, with more or less 
hesitation, that the human race is the result of 
a transformation, or a series of transformations. 
The attempt to establish the theory of spon- 
taneous production dates from a remote period. 
Science has ever baffled it. The more its ob- 
servations have been exact and profound, the 
more have they refuted the hypothesis of the 
innate creative power of matter. This result 
has been again recently established by the 
attentive examination of men of eminent scien- 
tific attainments, within and without the walls 
of the Academy of Sciences. But were it even 
otherwise, could the advocates of the theory of 
spontaneous production refer to experiments 
hitherto irrefutable, these would furnish no 
better explanation of the first appearance of 


man upon earth, and I should retain my right 


SECOND MEDITATION. 47 


to repeat here what I have advanced elsewhere 
on this subject:* “Such a mode of generation 
cannot, nor ever could produce any but infant 
beings in the first hour and in the first state of — 
incipient life. It has, I believe, never been 
| asserted, nor will any person ever affirm, that, 
by spontaneous generation, man, that is to say, 
man and woman, the human couple, can have 
issued, or that they have issued at any period, 
from matter, of full form and stature, in posses- 
sion of all their powers and faculties, as Greek 
Paganism represented Minerva issuing from the 
brain of J upiter. Yet it is only upon this sup- 
position that man, appearing for the first time 
upon earth, could have lived there to perpetuate 
his species and to found the human race, Let 
any one picture to himself the first man, born 
in a state of the earliest infancy, alive but inert, 
devoid of intelligence, powerless, incapable of 
satisfying his own wants even for a moment, 
trembling, sobbing, with no mother to listen to 


* L’Eglise et la Société Chrétienne en 1861, p. 27. 


bP 


R 
48 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 
int 4 


 orfeedhim! And yet we have in this a picture 


of the first man as presented by the system of 


spontaneous generation. It is manifestly not 


thus that the human race first appeared upon 
earth.” 

The system of the transformation of species is 
no less refuted by science than by the instincts 
of common sense. It rests upon no tangible 
fact, on no principle of scientific observation or 
historic tradition. All the facts ascertained, all 
the monuments collected in different ages and 
different places, respecting the existence of liv- 
ing species, disprove the hypothesis of their 
having undergone any transformation, any nota- 
ble and permanent change. We meet with 
them a thousand, two thousand, three thousand 


years ago, the same as they are at the present 


day. In the same species the races may vary 


and undergo mutual changes; the species do 
not change; and all attempts to transform them 
artificially, by crossings with allied species, have 


only resulted in modifications, which, after two 


SECOND MEDITATION. 49 
" ¥ 


ie 


or three generations, have been struck with ta 


barrenness, as if to attest the impotence of man 
to effect, by the progressive transformation of 
existing species, a creation of new species. Man 
is not an ape transformed and _ perfected by 
some dim imperceptible fermentation of the 
elements of nature and by the operation of 
ages. ‘This assumed explanation of the origin 
of the human species is a mere vague hypoth- 
esis, the fruit of an imagination ill comprehend- 
ing the spectacle that nature presents, and 
therefore easily seduced to form ingenious con- 
jectures. These their authors sow in the stream 
of events unknown and of time infinite, and 
trust to them for the realization of their dreams. 
The principle of the fundamental diversity and 
the permanence of species, firmly upheld by 
M. Cuvier, M. Flourens, M. Coste, M. Quatre- 
fages, and by all exact observers of facts, 
remains dominant in science as in reality.* 

* Cuvier—Discours sur les Révolutions du Globe, pp. 117, 120, 


124, (edit. 1825 ;) Flonrens—Ontologie Naturelle, pp. 10-87, 
4 


50 r THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


_ Besides these vain attempts to supersede God 
the creator, and to explain, by the inherent and 
progressive power of matter, the origin of man 
and of the world, the Christian dogma of crea- 
tion has yet other adversaries. One party to_ 
combat it seizes its arms from the Bible itself, 
alleging the account there given of the success- 
ive facts of the creation, of which the world 
and man were the result; they cite and enumer- 
ate the difficulties of reconciling this account 
with the observations and the conclusions of 
science. I shall weigh the force of this class of 
objections in treating of the inspiration of the 
Holy Scriptures, of their real object and true 


meaning; but I at once raise the dogma of 


(1861;) Journal des Savants, (October, November, and Decem- 
ber, 1863;) three articles on the work of Ch. Darwin, On the 
Origin of Species and the Laws of Progress among Organized 
Beings; Coste—Histoire Générale et Particuliére du Développe- 
ment des Corps Organisés; Discours Préliminaire, vol. i, p. 23; 
Quatrefages—Metamorphoses de Homme et des Animaux, p. 
225, (1862 ;) and his articles On the Unity of the Human Spe- 
cies, published in the “ Revue des Deux Mondes” in 1860 and 
1861, and collected in one volume, (1861.) 


SECOND MEDITATION. 55 


creation above this attack, placing it at its 
proper height and isolation. It is the general 
fact, it is the very principle of creation which 
constitutes the dogma; whatever may be the 
obscurities or the scientific difficulties presented 
by the biblical narrative, the principle and the 
general fact of the creation remain unaffected ; 
God the creator does not the less remain in pos- 
session of his work. The Christian religion, in 
its essence, asserts and demands nothing more. 

But lastly, the Christian dogma of creation is 
met by the general objection raised against all 
the facts and all the acts which are termed 
supernatural : that is to say, against the exist- 
ence of God as well as the dogma of creation, 
against all religions in common with Chris- 
tianity. Such a question requires to be consid- 
ered, not with reference to any particular 
dogma, or with a view to defend one side only 
of the edifice of Christianity. This point, then, 
I shall presently examine frankly and in all its 
bearings, 


52 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


II. PROVIDENCE. 


Gop the creator is also God the preserver. 
He lives, and is at the same time the source of 
life. The union between him and his creature 
does not cease when the creature is brought into 
existence. The dogma of Providence is conse- 
quent upon that of creation. 

Prayer is more than the mere outburst of the 
desires or sorrows of the soul, seeking that sat- 
isfaction, strength, or consolation which it does 
not find within itself; it is the expression of a 
faith, instinctive or reflective, obscure or clear, 
wavering or steadfast, in the existence, the 
presence, the power, and the sympathy of the 
Being to whom prayer is addressed. Without 
a certain measure of faith and trust in God, 
prayer would not burst forth, or would sud- 
denly be dried up in the soul. If faith every- 
where resists, and everywhere outlives all the 
denials, all the doubts, and all the darkness 


SECOND MEDITATION. 53 


which oppress mankind, it is that man bears 
within himself an imperishable consciousness 
of the enduring bond which connects him 
with God, and God with him. 

Far from destroying this sentiment, experi- 
ence and the spectacle of life explain and con- 
firm it. In reflecting on his destiny, man rec- 
ognizes in it three different sources, and divides, 
so to say, into three classes the facts which 
make up the whole. He is conscious of being 
subject to events which are the consequence of 
laws, general, permanent, and independent 
of his will, but which by his intelligence he 
observes and comprehends. By the act of his 
free will he also himself creates events, of 
which he knows himself to be the author, 
and these have their own consequences and 
enter too into the tissue of his life. Lastly, 
he passes through events, in his view, neither 
the result of those general laws from which 
nothing can withdraw him, nor the act 


of his own liberty, events of which he per- 


54 . THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


Pees neither the cause, the reason, nor the 
author. 

Man attributes this last class of events some- 
times to a blind cause, which he terms chance; 
at another, to an intelligent and supreme inten- 
tion which is in God. His mind at times 
revolts at the inanity of this word chance, 
which explains and defines nothing; and he 
then pictures to himself a mysterious, impene- 
trable power, a merely necessary chain of un- 
known facts, to which he gives the name of 
fatality, destiny. To account for this obscure 
and accidental part of human life, which orig- 
inates neither from any general and conceivable 
laws, nor from the free will of man himself, we 
must choose between fatality and Providence, 
chance and God. 

I express my meaning without hesitation. 
Whoever accepts as a satisfactory explanation 
the theory of fatality and chance, does not truly 
believe in God. Whoever believes truly in 


God, relies upon Providence. God is not an 


SECOND MEDITATION. 55 


expedient, invented to explain the first tink in 
the chain of causation, an actor called to open 
by creation the drama of the world, then to 
relapse into a state of inert uselessness. By the 
very fact of his existence, God is present with 
his work and sustains it. Providence is the 
natural and necessary development of God’s 
existence ; his constant presence and permanent 
action in creation. The universal and insuper- 
able instinct which leads man to prayer, is in 
harmony with this great fact; he who believes 
in God cannot but have recourse to him and 
pray to him. 

Objections are raised to the name itself of 
God. He acts, it is said, only by general and 
permanent laws: how can we implore his inter- 
ference in favor of our special and exceptional 
desires? He is immutable, ever perfect, and 
ever the same: how is it conceivable that he 
lends himself to the fickleness of. human senti- 
ments and wishes? The prayer which ascends 


to him is forgetful of his real nature. Men 


56 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


Have treated the attributes of God as furnish- 
ing an objection to his providence. 

This objection, so often repeated, never fails 
to astonish me. The majority of those who 
urge it, assert at the same time that God 1s 
‘ incomprehensible, and that we cannot penetrate 
‘the secret of his nature. What then is this but 
to pretend to comprehend God? and by what 
right do they oppose his nature to his provi- 
dence, if his nature is to us an impenetrable 
mystery ? I refrain from reproaching them for 
their ambition; ambition is the privilege and 
the glory of man; but in retaining it, let them 
not overlook its legitimate limits. There is 
only this alternative: either man must cease to 
believe in God, because he cannot comprehend 
him, or in effect admit his incomprehensibility, 
and still at the same time believe in him. He 
cannot pass and repass incessantly from one sys- 
tem to the other, now declaring God to be 
incomprehensible ; now speaking of him, of his 


nature and his attributes, as if he were within 


SECOND MEDITATION. 5 


the province of human science. Great as is the’ 
question of Providence, the one I have here to 
consider is still greater, for it is the question of 
the very existence of God; and the fundamental 
inquiry is to know whether he exists, or does 
not exist. God is at once light and mystery : *" 
in intimate relation with man, and yet beyond 
the limits of his knowledge. I shall presently 
endeavor to mark the limit at which human 
knowledge stops, and indicate its proper 
sphere; but this I at once assume as certain: 
whoever, believing in God and speaking of him 
as incomprehensible, yet persists in endeavoring 
to define him scientifically, and seeks to pene- 
trate the mystery, which he has yet admitted, 
is in great risk of destroying his own belief, 
and of setting God aside, which is one way of 
denying him. 

But I leave for a moment these two simul- 
taneous propositions, namely, the impossibility 
of comprehending God, and the necessity of be- 


lieving in him; and I proceed at once to that 


58 ‘THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


objection to the special providence of God 
which is drawn from the general character of 
the laws of nature. This objection results from 
confounding very different things, and overlook- 
ing a fundamental one, the fact characteristic 
indeed of human nature. It is true that the 
providence of God presides over the order of 
the world which he governs by general and per- 
manent laws; these laws would be more accu- 
rately designated by another name; they are 
the Will of God, continually acting upon the 
world, for not only the laws but the Lawgiver 
are there ever present. But when God created 
man, he created him different from the physical 
world; free, and a moral agent; and hence there 
is a fundamental difference between the action 
of God on the physical world, and his action on 
man. I shall subsequently state my opinion as 
to the full meaning of the expression, ‘“‘ Man is 
a free being,” and as to the nature of the con- 
sequences to which it leads; for the present, I 


assume, as a certain and incontestable fact, this 


SECOND MEDITATION. : 59 


principle of human liberty, of the free determ- 
ination of man considered as a moral agent. 
Admitting this, it cannot be said that God gov- 
erns mankind at large by general and perma- 
nent laws; for what would this be but to ignore 
or annul the liberty granted to man, that is to 
say, to misconceive and mutilate the work of 
God himself. Man exercises a free determina- 
tion, and in his own life actually gives birth to 
events which are not the result of any general 
and external laws. Divine Providence watches 
the operations of man’s volition, and records the 
manner in which it has been exercised. It 
does not treat man as it deals with the stars in 
heaven and the waves of the ocean, which have 
neither thought nor will; with man it has 
other relations than with nature, and employs 
a different mode of action. 

There is little wisdom in instituting compati- 
sons between objects or facts not essentially 
analogous; and the idea of God has been so 


often disfigured by representing him in the 


* ae 
60 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. a. 


image of man, that I mistrust the efficacy of 
any analogies borrowed from humanity to con- 
vey a conception of God. I cannot, however, 
overlook the fact, that God has created man in 
his own image, nor can I absolutely refrain 
from seeking, in nature or the life of man, 
some type to shadow forth the features of God. 
Let us consider the human family: the father 
and mother assist in directing the active devel- 
opment of the child; they watch over it with 
authority and tenderness; they control its lib- 
erty without annulling it, and they listen to 
its little prayers—now granting them, now re- 
fusing them, as their reason dictates, and with a 
view to the child’s main and future interests. 
The child, without thought or design, by the 
spontaneous instinct of its nature, recognizes 
the authority and feels the tenderness of its 
parents; as it advances in age, it sometimes 
obeys and sometimes resists their injunctions, 
using or misusing its natural liberty ; but in all 


the fickleness of its will, it asks, it entreats, full 


SECOND MEDITATION. ti 61 
of confidence—joyous and thankful when it 
obtains from its parents what it desires; yet, 
when denied, still ready again to ask and to 
entreat with the same confidence as before. 

This is what takes place in the government 
of the human family when ruled according to 
the dictates of nature and right. An image 
we have here, imperfect but still true—a shad- 
owing-forth, faint yet faithful—of Divine Prov- 
idence. Thus it is that the Christian religion 
qualifies and describes the action of God in the 
life of man. It exhibits God as ever present 
and accessible to man, as a father to his child; 
it exhorts, encourages, invites man to implore, 
to confide in, to pray to God. It reserves ab- 
solutely the answer of God to that prayer; he 
will grant, or he will refuse: we cannot pene- 
trate his motives—“ The ways of God are not 
our ways.” Nevertheless, to prayer, ceaseless 
and ever renewed, the Christian dogma associ- 
ates the firm hope that “nothing is impossible 
with God.” This dogma is thus in full and 


~ 


62 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. en 7 

intimate harmony with the nature of man; 
while recognizing his liberty, it does homage 
to his dignity ; in tendering to him the resource 
of an appeal to God it provides for his weak- 
ness. In science, it suppresses not the mystery 
which cannot be suppressed; but, in man’s 
life, it solves the natural problem which weighs 


upon the soul. | 


II. ORIGINAL SIN. 


Tur dogmas of Creation and Providence 
bring us into the presence of God; it is the 
action of God upon the world and man that 
they proclaim and affirm. The dogma of Orig- 
inal Sin brings us back to man; it is the act of 
man toward God, which stands at the very 
beginning of the history of mankind. 

In what does this dogma consist? What are 
the elements and the essential facts which con- 


stitute it, and upon which it is founded ? 


. ape SECOND MEDITATION. 83 

The dogma of Original Sin implies and 
affirms these propositions : 

1. That God, in creating man, has created 
him an agent, moral, free, and fallible. 

2. That the will of God is the moral law of 
man, and obedience to the will of God is the 
duty of man, inasmuch as he is a moral and 
free agent. 

83. That, by an act of his own free will, man 
has knowingly failed in his duty by disobeying 
the law of God. 

4. That the free man is a responsible being, 
and that disobedience to the law of God has 
justly entailed on him punishment. 

5. That that responsibility and that punish- 
ment are hereditary, and that the fault of the 
first man has weighed and does weigh upon the 
human race. 

The authority of God, the duty of obedience 
to the law of God, the liberty and responsi- 
bility of man, the heritage of human responsi- 
bility are, in their moral chronology, the prin- 


ce ,* THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


ciples and the facts comprised in the dogma of 
Original Sin. 
I turn away my attention for a moment from 


the dogma itself, its source, its history, the 


biblical and Christian tradition of this first step 


in evil of the human race. And considering 
man, his nature, and his destiny in their actual 
and general state, I investigate and verify the 
moral facts as they manifest themselves at the 
present day, to the eyes of good sense, amid 
the disputes of the learned. 

Man, at his birth, is subjected to the moral 
authority, as well as the physical power of the 
parents who, humanly speaking, created him. 
Obedience is to him a<duty, and at the same 
time a necessity. This physical necessity and 
this moral obligation, however ultimately con- 
nected with each other, are not one and iden- 
tical; and the child, in its spontaneous develop- 
ment, instinctively feels the moral obligation 
long before it is conscious of the physical neces- 


sity. The instinctive feeling of the obligation 
# 


SECOND MEDITATION. 65 


is united with the growing sentiment of affec- 
tion; and the child obeys the look, the voice 
of its mother, unconscious of its absolute de- 
pendence upon her. , 
As the sentiment of affection and the instinct 
of obligatory obedience are the first dawn of 
moral good in the development of the child, so 
the impulse to disobedience is the first symptom, 
the first appearance of moral evil. It is with 
the voluntary disobedience of the child to the 
will of its mother that the moral infraction 
commences, and it is in disobedience that it 
resides. It considers neither the motives nor 
the consequences of its act; it is simply con- 
scious that it disobeys, and regards its mother 
with a mingled feeling of restlessness and de- 
fiance; it tries, with hesitation, the maternal 
authority ; it strives to be, and especially to 
appear, independent of the natural and legiti- 
mate power which rules it, and which it recog- 
nizes at the very moment when it opposes its 


own will to that higher law. 
: 5 


i. 


66 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 
* 


As the child, so is the man. As man is born 
free, so he lives free; and as he is born subject, 
so he lives subject. Liberty coexists with au- 
thority and resists without annulling it. Au- 
thority exists before liberty, and as it does not 
yield to it, so neither does it supersede it. 
Man, inasmuch as he knows that he disobeys, 
yenders homage to authority by the very fact 
of his disobedience. Authority, on its side, 
recognizes the liberty of man, by the condemna- 
tion which it passes on him for having misused 
it; for he would not be responsible for his acts 
were he not free. In the coexistence of these 
two powers, authority and liberty, at one time in 
accordance, at another in conflict, lies the great 
secret of nature and of human destiny, the 
fundamental principle of man and of the world. 

Let it be clearly understood that I speak 
here of the moral world, of the world of 
thought and of will. In the physical world 
there is neither authority nor liberty; there 


are merely certain forces, forces acting inevita- 


SECOND MEDITATION. 67 


bly and unequally. If the question concerned 
the material world, could I do better than 
repeat what Pascal has admirably said: “Man 
is but a reed—the weakest in nature—but he 
is a reed which thinks; the universe need not 
rise in arms to. crush him; a vapor, a drop of 
water suffices to kill him. But were the unt 
verse to crush him, man would still be nobler 
than the power which killed him, for he knows 
that he dies; and of the advantage which the 
universe has over him, the universe knows 
nothing.” When man obeys or disobeys, he 
knows just as well that authority confronts 
vii as that liberty of action ®bides with him- 
self, He knows what he does, and he charges 
himself with the responsibility. Moral order is 
here complete. : 
Throughout all times and in all places, in all 
men, as in the first man, disobedience to legiti- 
mate authority is the principle and foundation 
of moral evil, or, to call it by its religious name, 


of sin. 


68 cae CHRISTIAN ibe: 


Disobedience has various and complicated 
sources; it may spring from a thirst for inde- 
pendence, from ambition or presumptuous curl- 
osity, or from giving rein to human inclinations 
and temptations; but, whatever its origin, dis- 
obedience is ever the essential characteristic of 
that free act which constitutes sin, as it is also 
the source of the responsibility which accom- 
panies it. | 

Eminent men, eminently pious men, have 
combated the doctrine of human liberty; un- 


able to reconcile it with what they term the 


divine prescience, they have denied the fun- 
’ 


damental fact ofthe nature of man, rather than 


fully acknowledge the mystery of the nature 


of God. Others, equally eminent and sincere, 
have limited themselves to raising doubts re- 
garding human liberty, and denying it the 
value of an absolute and peremptory fact. In 
my opinion they have confounded facts essen- 
tially different, although intimately blended; 
they have ignored the special and simple char- 


a 


ip 


| * 
ee ‘ 
F D MEDITATION, 69 


acter of the very Pai of free will. During a 
course of lectures which I delivered thirty-five 
years ago at the Sorbonne, on the history of 
civilization in France, having occasion to ex- 
amine the controversy of St. Augustine with 
Pelagius on free will, predestination, and grace, 
‘I explained these subjects in terms which I 
repeat here, finding no others which appear to 
me more exact and more complete: | 

“The fact which lies at the foundation of the 
whole -dispute,” I said in 1829, “is liberty, free 
will, the human will. To comprehend this fact 
exactly we must divest it of every foreign ele- 
ment, and confine it strictly to itself.’ It is the 
want of this precaution that has led to such 
frequent misconception of the thing itself; men 
have not looked simply at the fact of liberty, 
and at that alone. It has been viewed and 
described, so to speak, péleméle with other 
facts, closely connected to it, it is true, in the 
moral life of man, but which are no less essen- 


tially different. For example, human liberty 


70 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


has been said to consist in the act of deliberat- 
ing upon and choosing between motives; that 
deliberation, and that choice and judgment 
consequent upon it, have been regarded as the 
essence of free will. Not so at all. These are 
acts of the intellect, not of liberty; it is before 
the intellect that the various motives of resolu- 
tion and action, interests, passions, opinions, 
and such like present themselves; the intellect 
considers, compares, estimates, weighs, and 
judges them. This is a preparatory task 
which precedes the act of volition, but which 
does not in any way constitute it. When, after 
deliberation, man has taken full cognizance of 
the motives presented to him, and of their 
value, there takes place a process entirely 
new, and wholly different, that of free will; 
man forms a resolution, that is to say, he com- 
mences a series of facts having their source in 
himself, of which he regards himself as the 
author; and these are effectuated because he 


wills them; they would have no existence 


SECOND MEDITATION. vel 


did he not will it, and ould be different if 
he desired to produce them otherwise. Now, 
let us imagine all remembrance of this process 
of intellectual deliberation obliterated, the 
motives so known and appreciated, forgotten ; 
concentrate your thought, and that of the 
man who takes a resolution, upon the moment 
when he says, ‘It is my will, therefore I shall 
do so; and ask yourself, ask too the man, 
whether he could not will and act otherwise. 
Without doubt, you will reply, as he will do, 
‘Assuredly,’ and this it is that reveals the fact 
of liberty; it consists wholly in the resolution 
which man takes after the deliberation is at 
an end; it is the resolution that is the proper 
act of man, which is through him and through 
him alone; a simple act, independent of all 
the facts which precede or accompany it, iden- 
tical in the most varied circumstances, always 
the same, whatever be its motives or its results. 

“At the same time that man feels himself 


free, and is conscious of the power of com- 


y! 


1b igen THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


# 


mencing by his own will alone a series of 
facts, he recognizes that his will is subjected 
to the empire of a certain law, which takes 
different names, according to the circumstances 
to which it is applied—moral law, reason, good 
sense, etc. . . . Man is free, but according even 
to man’s own way of thinking his will is not 
arbitrary ; he may use it in an absurd, senseless, 
unjust, and culpable manner, and whenever he 
uses it a certain rule must govern it. The 
observance of this rule is his duty, the task 
assigned to his liberty.” 

It is that act of a will (that is to say, of a 
will strictly brought back to its central and 
essential limits) acting freely in the intimate 
recesses of his being, which, in the case of 
disobedience to the law of duty, constitutes 
in man sin, and entails on him its responsibility. 

Is this responsibility exclusively personal, 
and limited to the author of the act, or com- 
municated, so to say, by contagion, and trans- 


mitted in a certain measure to his descendants ? 


ts a 
SECOND MEDITATION. 73 
; © 


I am still considering only actual appreciable 
acts, such as they produce and manifest them- 
selves in the moral life of the human race. 

We find the poetry and mythology of nearly 
all nations expressing the idea of an Utopian 
state of existence, referred to times remote 
and primitive, to which they assign different 
names, as the Golden Age, the Age of the 
Gods, and which they picture as an epoch 
when there existed no moral and physical evil 
in the world—an era of peace, bliss, and 
innocence. This is the more remarkable, as 
it has no foundation, and finds no pretext in 
any tradition of historical times, however re- 
mote; for from the commencement of history, 
from the time that we can discern any trace 
of facts at all precise and authentic, it is not 
the Golden Age; on the contrary, it is the 
Iron Age which appears, an epoch of violence 
and ignorance and barbarism, in which war 
and force are rampant, and which has not in 


effect the least resemblance to those beautiful 


74 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


dreams of ancient poetry. Without now seek- 
ing to establish any relation between these 
mythological. dreams and the biblical tradi- 
tions, or, for the moment, drawing from the 
Golden Age any argument in support of the 
Garden of Eden, I merely point it out as a 
great fact, as evidence of a general instinct, 
so to say, of the human imagination. What 
is the meaning of this? Whence comes this 
Utopia of innocence and bliss in the cradle of 
the human race? To what does this idea of 
a primal time, without strife, without sin, and 
without pain, correspond ? 

But from this cradle of man and this primi- 
tive poetry to revert to the present time, to 
real lifeto the cradle of the infant, why is it 
that, apart from all personal affection, we so 
readily term infancy the age of innocence? 
How is it that we find it so charming to give it 
this name and regard it under this aspect? 
Physical ill is already present, for it begins 
with the very beginning of life; but moral ill 


SECOND MEDITATION. "5 


has not yet appeared; life has not yet brought 
to the soul its trials, nor called forth its failings, 
and the idea of the soul without spot or stain 
has for us an inexpressible attraction; we feel 
a deep joy in witnessing innocence, or at least 
its image in the child when we no longer see it 
around us, nor find it within ourselves. 
‘What means this universal instinct, which in 
the dreams of the imagination, as well as in the 
intimate scenes of domestic life, whether we 
turn in thought to the cradle of the human race 
or to that of the infant, leads us to regard inno- 
cence as the primitive and normal state of man, 
and makes us place in the spot where innocence 
resides that which some term Paradise, and 
others the Golden Age? 

Manifestly between the soul without'spot and 
the soul tainted with evil, between the creature 
who is merely fallible and the creature who 
has sinned, there is a very great change of 
state, a distance immense, an abyss. We have 


a secret feeling of this deplorable change, of the 


76 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


fall into this abyss; and it is without .premed- 
itation, by the mere impulse of our nature, that 
we suffer our thoughts to bear us far, far be- 
yond that abyss, and to pause on the rapturous 
contemplation of a state anterior to the fall. 
Hence spring, and thus are explained, the 
power and the charm which the idea of inno- 
cence has for us; absolute innocence we have 
never seen, but the idea is still vouchsafed to 
us; and so it appears to us in the cradle of the 
world and in the cradle of the infant, and the 
pleasure is infinite which we derive from 
the ideal spectacle of purity which they each 
suggest. 

Is this a pleasure foreign to all personal sen- 
timent, to all secret. reference to ourselves, the 
pleasure, that is to say, of a simple spectator ? 
No; these impressions which the picture of in- 
nocence awakens in us are connected with and 
carry us back to ourselves; this change in the 
state of man, that mysterious past which has 


thrown him so far from innocence, leaving him, 


SECOND MEDITATION. [7 


nevertheless, the idea and the worship of it, 
these were not the lot of the first man alone; 
the entire human race was, and remains subject 
to them. Our present evil does not proceed 
solely from ourselves; we have received it as a 
heritage before having brought it upon us as a 
penalty. We are not merely fallible beings, 
we are the children of a being who has sinned. 

How can we feel surprise at this inheritance 
of woe? Have we not dayly the example and 
the spectacle before our eyes? It is an incon- 
testable and undisputed fact that two elements 
enter into the moral life of man: on the one 
side, his innate dispositions, his natural and in- 
voluntary inclinations ; on the other, his inmost 
and individual will. The natural inclinations of 
a man do not destroy his moral liberty, nor en- 
slave his will, but they render its exercise more 
laborious and more difficult to him; it is not a 
chain which he carries, it is a burden that he 
bears. Equally incontestable and undisputed is 


it that the natural dispositions of men are differ- 


78 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


ent and unequally distributed; no one is en- 
tirely exempt from evil inclinations ; every man 
is not only fallible, but prone to transgress, and 
prone not only to transgress, but to transgress 
in some particular direction or other. Nor can 
the fact be disputed, although appreciable with 
_ more difficulty, that the natural and special dis- 
positions of the individual descend to him in a 
certain measure from his origin, and that par- 
ents transmit to their children such or such 
moral propensities just as they do such or such 
physical temperament, or such or such features. 
Hereditary transmission enters into the moral 
as well as the physical order of the world. 

This inheritance must take effect ; 1t has done 
‘so from the first days of man’s existence upon 
earth, for man has been created complete in his 
whole nature. And While, at the same time as 
complete, he has been created fallible, I ask, 
Who shall measure the distance between man 
PAI tabsut till ayithoutianltdand he seh 
transgression? Who shall sound the depth of 


SECOND MEDITATION. . 79 


the fall and of the change which it brought 
into the moral condition of its author? Who 
shall weigh the consequences of this change to 
the state and the moral dispositions of man’s 
descendants? To appreciate the extent and 
gravity of this awful fact, of this first appear- 
ance and this first heritage of moral evil, we 
have but one test: the instinct we still preserve 
of a state of innocence, and of the immense 
space which this instinct irresistibly compels us 
to place between native innocence and man’s 
first transgression ; but this test is unexception- 
able ; it dimly reveals to us, in this fatal trans- 
formation, the whole infirmity and responsibility 
of the human race. 

An objection is raised to this as an injustice. 
How, it is said, can each man be responsible 
for a fault which he has not himself committed, 
for the transgression of another man, separated 
from himself by so many ages? I consider this 
objection weak and frivolous. Such an objection 


would attach to all the inequalities which exist 


fe 
, 4 
80 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


£ among men, to the inequality of the destinies 
as well as that of the nature of man, to the in- 
equality of his moral disposition as well as to 
that, of hi his physical powers. The objection 
would séfach to the solidarity of successive 
generations, and the controlling influence which 
the ideas, the acts, the destiny of each afi them 
exert on the ideas, the acts, the destiny of those 
which follow it. The objection would attach to 
the ties which unite the child with its parents, 
and which are the cause of its sometimes inherit- 
ing their evil dispositions, and sometimes suffer- 
ing for their faults. It is, in short, the general 
order of the world to which such an objection 
must apply; it is the very existence of evil, 
and its unequal distribution in a manner wholly 
independent of individual merit which assumes 
the character of a monstrous iniquity. And 
when we come to this point, that we no longer 
refer the source of evil to the fault and the 
responsibility of man, placed here on earth in 


a scene and period of transition and of trial, 


? 


a 


SECOND MEDITATION. 81 
a 


see to what alter native we are e brought. Wem, 
must either regard evil as natural, _eternal, , 
necessary, in the future as in the past, as the 


nae Fs 


normal state of man and of the wo rlé ; 


to say, we must deny God, the Mreation, the 
divine providence, human mor ality, liberty, re- 
sponsibility and hope; or, on the other hand, 
it is to God himself that we must impute evil, 
and whom we must render accountable. 

The dogma of Original Sin alone relieves the 
human mind from this odious and unacceptable 
alternative: far from being in contradiction 
either with the history of humanity, or with 
the facts and instincts which constitute man’s 
moral nature, this dogma admits, illustrates, 
and explains them. The fact of original sin 
presents nothing strange, nothing obscure; it 
consists essentially in disobedience to the will 
of God, which will is the moral law of man. 
This disobedience, the sin of Adam, is an act 
committed everywhere and every day, arising 


from the same causes, marked by the same 
6 


82 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. : 


characters, and attended by the same 
quences as the Christian dogma assigns to it. 
At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, 
this act is occasioned by a thirst for absolute 
independence, the ambitious aspirings of curi- 
osity and pride, or weakness in the face of 
temptation. At the present day, as in the 
Garden of Eden, it produces an immense 
change in the inmost state of man, a change, 
the mere idea of which seizes upon the human 
soul, and disturbs it to its very depths ; it trans- 
ports man from the state of innocence to the 
state of sin. At the present day, as in the 
Garden of Eden, the act which produces this 
change involves and entails the responsibility 
not only of its author, but of his descendants ; 
sin 18 contagious in time as in space, it is trans- 
mitted, as well as diffused. The Christian 
dogma exhibits the first man created fallible, 
but born innocent ; innocent at the age of man, 
proud in the plenitude of his faculties, not the 
subject of any evil and fatal heritage. All at 


_ 


sy SECOND MEDITATION. xe 83 


once, for the first time, of his own will, man 
disobeys God. acre lies Original Sin, the same 
in its nature as sin at the present day, for they 
both consist in disobedience to the law of God, 
but it is the first in date in the history of man’s 
liberty, and the human source of that evil for 
which the Christian religion, while pointing it 


out, offers to man the remedy and the cure, 


IV. THE INCARNATION. 


Att religions have given a prominent place 
to the problem of existence and the origin of 
evil; all have attempted its solution. The 


good and the evil genius, Ormuzd and Ahr- 


man among the Persians; God the Creator, © 


God the Preserver, and God the Destroyer— 
Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva —in India; the 
Titans overwhelmed by the thunderbolts of 
Jove while scaling Olympus; Prometheus 
chained to the rock for having snatched fire 


from heaven; all are so many hypotheses to 


84 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


explain the conflict between good and. evil, 
between order and disorder in the world and 


in man. But all these hypotheses are compli- 


cated, confused, and encumbered with chimeras 


and fables; all attribute the derivation of evil 
to incongruous causes, none assign any term to 
the conflict, nor find a remedy for the evil. 
The Christian religion alone clearly states and 
effectually solves the question ; it alone imputes 
to man himself, and to him alone, the origin of 
evil; it alone represents God as intervening to 
raise man from his fall, and to save him from 
his peril. 

In the course of the sixth and fifth centuries 
before the Christian era a great fact appears in 
history; a breath of reform, religious, moral, 
and social arises, and spreads from east to west, 
among all the nations then at all progressing in 
the path of civilization. Notwithstanding the 
uncertainties of chronology, it may be said, ac- 
cording to the most recent and accurate re- 


searches, that Confucius in China, the Buddha 


7% 


SECOND MEDITATION. 85 


Cakya-Mouni in India, Zoroaster in Persia, 
Pythagoras and Socrates in Greece, are all in- 
cluded in the limits of this epoch;* men as 
dissimilar as they are celebrated, but who have 
all, in different ways and in unequal degrees, 
undertaken a great work of reforming both the 
men and the social institutions of their times. 
Confucius was above all a practical moralist, 
skilled in observation, counsel, and discipline ; 
Buddha Cakya-Mouni, a dreamer, and a mys- 
tical and popular preacher ; Zoroaster, a legis- 
lator, religious and political ; Pythagoras and 
Socrates, philosophers, bent upon instructing 
the distinguished bands of disciples whom they 
gathered around them. There is no doubt, 
notwithstanding the trials of their life, that 
neither power nor glory among their cotem- 
poraries was wanting to them. Confucius and 


* Those researches give the following dates: 1. Confucius, 
from 551 to 478 B. O.; 2. Zoroaster, from 564 to 487, or from 
589 to 512 B.C; 3. Buddha Cakya-Mouni, in the seventh and 
sixth centuries B. O., (he died, according to Burnouf, 543 B. ©. ;) 
4. Pythagoras, from 580 to 500 B. C.; 5. Socrates, 470 to 400 
or 399 B. ©. 


86 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


Zoroaster were the favorites and counselors of 
kings. Buddha Cakya-Mouni, himself the son 
of a king, became the idol of innumerable 
multitudes. Pythagoras and Socrates formed 
schools and pupils who were an honor to the 
human mind. By their personal genius, and 
by the excellence of some of their ideas and 
actions, these men have insured themselves the 
admiration of all posterity. Did they act up 
to their teachings, and accomplish what. they 
attempted ? Did they really change the moral 
and social condition of nations? Did they 
cause humanity to make any great progress, 
and open to it horizons which it had not before 
known? By no means. Whatever fame at- 
taches to the names of these men, whatever 
influence they may have exerted, whatever 
trace of their passage may have remained, they 
rather appeared to have power than really to 
possess it; they agitated the surface far more 
than they stirred the depths; they did not 


draw nations out of the beaten tracks in which 


SECOND MEDITATION. 87 


they had lived. They did not transform souls. 
In considering the facts at large, and notwith- 
standing the political and material revolutions 
which they underwent, China after Confucius, 
India after Buddha, Persia after Zoroaster, 
Greece after Pythagoras and Socrates, followed 
in the same ways, retained the same propensi- 
ties as before. Still more, among these very 
different nations, stagnation was only to be 
succeeded by decay. Where are these nations 
at the present day, more than two thousand 
years after the appearance of these glorious 
characters in their history? What great prog- 
ress, what salutary changes have been effected 2 
What are they in comparison and in contact 
with Christian nations? Outside of Christian- 
ity there have been grand spectacles of activ- 
ity and force, brilliant phenomena of genius 
and virtue, generous attempts at reform, 
Jearned philosophical systems, and beautiful 
mythological poems; no real profound or fruit- 


ful regeneration of humanity and of society. 


tm! 


’ 
88 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


A few ages only after these barren efforts 
among the great nations of the world, Jesus 
Christ appears among a small, obscure people, 
weak and despised. He himself is weak and 
despised in the midst of his people; he neither 
possesses nor seeks any social power, any tem- 
poral means of action and of success; he col- 
lects around him only disciples weak and 
despised as himself. Not only are they weak 
and despised, they proclaim it themselves, and, 
far from being troubled at this, they glory in 
it, and derive from it confidence. St. Paul 
writes to the Corinthians, “And I, brethren, 
when I came to you, came not with excellency 
of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the 
testimony of God. For I determined not to 
know anything among you, ‘save Jesus Christ, 
and him crucified. And I was with you in 
weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. 
. .. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, 
in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in 


distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am 


« 
SECOND MEDITATION. 89 
weak, then am I strong.””* And in truth, 
Jesus Christ, the Master of St. Paul, is strong 
in his sufferings, and imparts his strength to 
his disciples; from his cross he accomplishes 
what erewhile, in Asia and Europe, princes 
and philosophers, the powerful of the earth, 
and sages, attempted without success; he 
changes the moral state and the social state 
of the world; he pours into the souls of men 
new enlightenment and new powers; for all 
classes, for all human conditions, he prepares 
destinies before his advent unknown ; he liber- 
ates them at the same time that he lays down 
rules for their guidance; he quickens them 
and stills them; he places the divine law and 
human liberty face to face, and yet still in 
harmony; he offers an effectual remedy for 
the evil which weighs upon humanity ; to sin 
he opens the path of salvation, to unhappiness 
the door of hope. 
Whence comes this power? What are its 


* 1 Cor. ii, 1-8; 2 Cor. xii, 10, 


90 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


source and its nature? How did those who 
were its witnesses and instruments think and 
speak of it at the moment when it was mani- 
fested 2 

They all, unanimously, saw in Jesus Christ, 
God; most of them, from the first moment, 
suddenly moved and enlightened by his pres- 
ence and his words; some, with rather more 
surprise and hesitation, but soon penetrated 
and convinced in their turn. “When Jesus 
came into the coasts of Cesarea Philippi, he 
asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say 
that J, the Son of man, am? And they said, 
Some say that thou art John the Baptist; 
some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of 
the prophets. He saith unto them, But whom 
say ye that lam? And Simon Peter answered 
and said, Thou art the Christ, the son of the 
living God. And Jesus answered and said 
unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: 
for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto 


thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” 


SECOND MEDITATION. 91 


Another day, meeting with a similar instance 
of doubt, Jesus says to Thomas, “If ye had 
known me, ye should have known my Father 
also: and from henceforth ye know him, and 
have seen him. Philip saith unto him, Lord, 
show us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus 
saith unto him, Have I been so long time with 
you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? 
he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” * 
It has been remarked that there are certain 
variations in the language of the apostles, 
and certain shades of difference in their lead- 
ing impressions; and this is indeed true: they 
call Jesus Christ at one time the Son of God, 
at another the Son of man; they regard him 
and represent him now under his divine aspect, 
at another under his human aspect; they do 
not present exactly the same image of him; 
they do not equally dwell upon the same traits 
of his nature, or the same facts of his earthly 
life. St, Matthew is more a narrator and mor- 


* John xiv, 7-9. 


99 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


alist; it is he who relates with fuller details 
the birth and childhood of Jesus Christ, and 
who gives at the greatest length the Sermon 
on the Mount. St. John is more in the habit 
of contemplating and depicting the divine 
nature of Jesus Christ and his relation to God: 
“Tn the beginning was the Word, and the 
Word was with God, and the Word was God. 
... And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt 
among us, and we beheld his glory, the 
glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, 
full of grace and truth.... No man hath 
seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, 
which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath 
declared him.”* It is also St. John who relates 
the testimony of the forerunner, St. John the 
Baptist, answering to those who had said to 
him that all men come to Jesus Christ: “Ye 
yourselves bear me witness, that I said, I am 
not the Christ, but that I am sent before him. 
. .. He that cometh from above is above all. 


* John i, 1, 14, 18. 


SECOND MEDITATION. 93 - 


... He whom God hath sent speaketh the 
words of God: for God giveth not the Spirit 
by measure unto him. The Father loveth the 
‘Son, and hath given all things into his hand.” * 
St. Paul is more systematic, and enters more 
fully into the questions and principles of the 
Christian doctrine, and he regards the divinity 
of Jesus Christ as the first of these principles. 
He writes to the Philippians: “Let this mind 
be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: 
who, being in the form of God, thought it no 
usurpation to be equal with God: but made 
himself of no reputation, and took upon him 
the form of a servant, and was made in the 
likeness of men: and being found in fashion as 
a man, he humbled himself, and became obedi- 


ent unto death, evep the death of the cross.”+ 


* John iii, 28, 81, 34, 35. 

+ Philippians ii, 5-8. I have given this verse in Osterwald’s 
translation, which is also that of the Vulgate; but my son Guil- 
laume, who is following out a careful course of study of Latin 
and Greek philology in sacred and profane literature, reminds 
me that the text of this passage presents a difficulty which fur- 
nished a field for the labors of Erasmus, Cameron, Grotius, 


94 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


... It is he “who is the image of the invisible” 


God, the first-born of every creature: for by 


Méric Casaubon, in the sixteenth century, as well as many 
others before and after them. The Greek word demaypd¢ ad- 
mits of two meanings, an active and a passive sense—it may 
designate the action of ravishing, of carrying off by force, or 
the object carried off—the act of depredation, or the spoil. Sub- 
stantives derived from verbs frequently waver between these 
two acceptations, and the word dperayf, which is merely another 
form of dprayyzéc, is unquestionably a case in point. AXschylus, 
Euripides, Herodotus, have employed it in the first sense; 
schylus, Euripides, Thucydides, and Polybius in the second 
sense. Now, in the passage of St. Paul, accordingly as one or 
the other sense is adopted, these words must either be trans- 
lated thus, ‘He did not consider it a usurpation to be equal 
to God;” or thus, ‘He did not display as a trophy his equality 
to God;” that is to say: He did not display his equality with 
God as the conquerors of the earth display the spoils and booty 
which they have amassed; he did not make use of his divinity 
to reign, to triumph, to pride himself in it; he was not the 
Messiah whom the carnal Jews expected, a visible king and 
victorious in arms; but, on the contrary, “he humbled himself, 
and took upon him the form of a servant,” etc., ete. This 
second interpretation seems more probable; the reasoning on 
which it is founded is thus more connected and flowing, and 
at the same time it leaves the doctrine of the apostle intact; it 
changes nothing in his conception or his conclusions. In this 
passage, as in many others, St. Paul likewise affirms the divinity 
of the Saviour whom he announces to men; and it is from this 
inajesty, subjected to a voluntary humiliation, vailed under the 
form of a servant, obedient unto the death of the cross, that he 
presents an august example and an imperative lesson for Chris- 
tians of humility and mutual support. It is thus that this 
interpretation has been admitted and defended by two eminent 
men, a scholar of the sixteenth and a theologian of the nine- 


r+ 
con 


“ 
SECOND MEDITATION. 95 


“Ein were all things created, that are in heaven, 
and that are in earth, visible and invisible, 
whether they be thrones, or dominions, or 
principalities, or powers: all things were cre- 
ated by him, and for him: and he is before 
all things, and by him all things consist.”* St. 
Peter and St. John, in their Epistles, speak in 
the same terms as St. Paul. St. Peter says, 
“We have not followed cunningly devised 
fables, when we made known unto you the 
power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he 
received from God the Father honor and glory, 
when there came such a voice to him from 
the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, 
in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.” + 
St. John writes: “ Whosoever denieth the Son, 
the same hath not the Father: but he that 


teenth century, both of whom were strongly attached to the 
dogma of the divinity of Jesus Christ—I allude to Méric Casau- 
bon (De Verborum Usu, pp. 188-146, at the end of the letters 
of his father,) and M. A. Vinet (Homilétique, p. 116.) 

* Ool. 115817: t 2 Peter i, 16,17; Matt. xvii, 5. 


96 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also.” * 
“Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: every 
Spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come 
in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that 
confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the 
flesh is not of God.” + 

Such is the language of the apostles; such 
are, at the same time, its shades of variance and 
its harmony. They have all evidently the 
same conception of Jesus Christ, they have all 
the same faith in him. St. Matthew, as well as 
St. John, St. Peter, and St. Paul, alike regard 
Jesus Christ as at once God and man, the rep- 
resentative of God on earth, and the Mediator 
between God and men—come from God, and 
reascended unto him as the source and center 
of his being. The dogma of the Incarnation, 
that is to say, of the divinity of Jesus Christ, 
the Gospels, 
the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of the 
Apostles, the writings of the first Fathers. It 


pervades the Holy Scriptures 


* 1 John ii, 23. t 1 John iy, 2, 3. 


SECOND MEDITATION. 97 


is the common and fixed basis, the source and 
essence of the Christian faith, 

This was affirmed and declared by Jesus 
Christ himself. What his diciples believed and 
related of him is what he himself told them of 
himself, as well as what they themselves wit- 
nessed and thought of him: “ All things are 
delivered unto me of my Father: and no man 
knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither know- 
eth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to 
whomsoever the Son will reveal him.”* “TI and 
my Father are one.” + And when he approaches 
the term of his mission, when, after having 
announced to his disciples that the hour was com- 
ing when they would be dispersed, each going his 
own way, leaving him alone, Jesus Christ raises 
his thoughts to God and says, “ Father, the hour 
is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may 
glorify thee: as thou hast given him power 
over all flesh, that he should give eternal life 
to as many as thou hast given him. And this 


* Matt. xi, 27; t John x, 30. 
a 


98 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


is life eternal, that they might know thee the 
only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou 
hast sent. I have glorified thee on the earth: 
I have finished the work which thou gavest 
me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou 
me with thine own self with the glory which I 
had with thee before the world was. I have 
manifested thy name unto the men which thou 
gavest me out of the world: thine they were, 
and thou gavest them me; and they have kept 
thy word. Now they have known that all 
things whatsoever thou hast given me are of 
thee. For I have given unto them the words 
which thou gavest me; and they have re- 
ceived them, and have known surely that I 
came out from thee, and they have believed 
that thou didst send me. I pray for them: 
I pray not for the world, but for them which 
thou hast given me; for they are thine. And 
all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and J 
am glorified in them. And now I am no more 


in the world, but these are in the world, and I 


SECOND MEDITATION. 99 


come to thee. Holy Father, keep through 
thine own name those whom thou hast given 
me, that they may be one, as we are.”* 

I might multiply these texts; but these 
surely suffice to show that the words of Jesus 
Christ in relation to himself, and those of his 
apostles, are in perfect unison; he speaks of 
himself as they speak of him; he qualifies him- 
self as they qualify him; he calls God his 
“Father,” as his disciples call him “the Son of 
God.” He has the same faith in himself, in 
his nature, and in his mission, as St. Matthew, 
St. John, St. Peter, and St. Paul had in him. 

It is a great source of error, in the study of 
facts, not to know how to stop at their general 
and essential features, and, losing sight of these, 
to give prominence to partial and secondary 
features. On the subject of the divinity of Jesus 
Christ, that fundamental principle of the Chris- 
tian religion, the precise meaning and import of 
such or such a word may be disputed; such or 


* John xvii, 1-11. 


100 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


such an expression may be thought an interpo- 
lation, and so eliminated in any particular gospel, 
in any particular epistle; nevertheless there 
will always remain infinitely more than sufii- 
cient evidence of the fact that those who at the 
present day believe in the divinity of Jesus 
Christ, believe simply what the apostles be- 
lieved and said, and that the apostles them- 
selves only believed and said, nearly nineteen 
centuries ago, what Jesus Christ himself said to 
them. 

The opponents of the dogma of the Incarna- 
tion and of the divinity of Jesus Christ disre- 
gard equally man and history, the complex ele- 
ments of human nature, and the meaning of 
the great facts which mark the religious life of 
the human race. 

What is man himself, but an incomplete and 
imperfect incarnation of God? The material- 
ists who deny the soul, and the naturalists who 
deny creation, are alone consistent in rejecting 


the Christian dogma. All who believe in the 


SECOND MEDITATION. 101 


distinction of spirit and matter, who do not be- 
lieve that man is the result of the fermentation 
of matter, or of the transformation of species, 
are constrained to admit the presence in human 
nature of the divine element, and they must 
necessarily accept these words in Genesis: 
“God created man in his own image;” that is 
to say, they must acknowledge the presence of 
God in frail and fallible humanity. 

I open the histories of all religions, of all 
mythologies, the most refined as well as the 
grossest ; I find at every step the idea and the 
assertion of the Divine incarnation. Brahmin- 
ism} Buddhism, Paganism, all faiths, all religious 
idolatries, abound in incarnations of every kind 
and date, primitive or successive, connected 
with this or that historical event, adapted to 
explain this or that fact, to satisfy this or that 
human propensity. It is the natural and uni- 
versal instinct of men to picture to themselves 
the action of God upon the human race under 


the form of the incarnation of God in man, 


102 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


Like all religious instincts, that of the belief 
in the Divine incarnation may engender, and 
has engendered, the most absurd superstitions, 
the most extravagant hypotheses. In the same 
way as the natural faith in God has been the 
source of all idolatries, so the tendency to incar- 
nate God in man has given rise to, and admitted 
every kind of strange imagining and spurious 
tradition. 

Are we then to pronounce all divine incar- 
nation false, every tradition of it spurious ? 
Rather let us say that it proceeds from the in- 
firmity of the human mind, if we see realities 


and mere chimeras, truths and errors, in such 


close proximity, if we find them calling one — 


another by the same names and unceasingly 
confounding one another’s attributes. The pre- 
tended incarnation of Brahma, or of Buddha, 
proves no more against the divinity of Jesus 
Christ than the adoration of idols proves against 
the existence of God. Jesus Christ, God and 


man, has characteristics which appertain to him 


SECOND MEDITATION. 103 


alone. These have founded his power and oc- 
casioned the success of his works, a power and a 
success which belong to him alone. It is not a 
human reformer, but God himself, who, through 
Jesus Christ, has accomplished what no human 
reformer has ever accomplished, or even con- 
ceived, the reform of the moral and social con- 
dition of the world, the regeneration of the 
human soul, and the solution of the problems 
of human destiny. It is by these signs, by 
these results, that the divinity of Jesus Christ is 
manifested. How was the Divine incarnation 
accomplished in man? Here, as in the union 
of the soul and the body, as in the creation, 
arises the mystery; but if we cannot fathom 
the reason of it, the fact not the less exists, | 
When this fact has taken the form of dogma, 
theology has sought to explain it. In my opin- 
ion this was a mistake; :theology has obscured 
the fact in developing and commenting upon it. 
Tt is the fact itself of the incarnation which 


constitutes the Christian faith, and which rises 


104 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. me * 


above all definitions and all theological contro- 
versies. To disregard this fact, to deny the 
divinity of Jesus Christ, is to deny, to over- 
throw the Christian religion, which would 
never have been what it is, and would never 
have accomplished what it has, but that the 
Divine incarnation was its principle, and Jesus 


Christ, God and man, its author. 


V. THE REDEMPTION. 


I nnrer into the sanctuary of the Christian 
faith. 

God has done more than manifest himself in 
Jesus Christ. He has done more than place 
upon the earth and before men his own living 
image, the type of sanctity and the model of 
life. The Creator has accomplished, through 
Jesus Christ, toward man, his creature, an act 
of his beneficence and at the same time of his 


sovereign power. Jesus Christ is not only God 


a SECOND MEDITATION, 105 


made man to spread the divine light upon men; 
he is God made man to conquer and efface in 
man moral evil, the fruit of the sin of man. He 
brings not only light and law, but pardon and 
salvation. And it is at the price of his ‘own 
suffering, of his own sacrifice, that he brings 
these to them. He is the type of self-devotion 
at the same time as of sanctity. He has sub- 
mitted to be a victim in order to be a saviour. 
The incarnation leads to the cross, and the cross 
to the redemption. 

Here are the supreme dogma and mystery.’ 
Here are revealed plainly the sense and the 
import of Christianity. By what ways did 
Jesus Christ penetrate the human goul to ac- 
complish this great work? How did he win 
the human soul to the Christian faith in order 
to snatch it from evil and to save it ? 

When man fails in the duty of which he 
recognizes the law, when he commits the wrong 
which he is bound to shun, when, after sin, 


repentance arises within him, and a sense of the 


106 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 
<3 


necessity of expiation is soon joined with this 
sentiment of repentance, the moral instinct of 
man teaches that repentance does not suffice to 
efface the fault, and that it requires to be ex- 
piated. Reparation supposes suffering. 

And when the religious sentiment is joined 
to the moral sentiment, when man believes in 
God, and sees in him the author and dispenser 
of the moral law, he regards himself as guilty of 
transgression toward God whom he has dis- 
obeyed, he feels the need of being pardoned and 
of being restored to the favor of the sovereign 
master whom he has offended. 

Among all nations, in all religions, under all 
social forms, these two instincts, as to the 
necessity of expiation to ensue upon the fault, 
and the necessity of pardon to follow the trans- 
gression, appear natural and inherent in the 
human soul. They have been at all times and 
in all places the source of a multitude of beliefs 
and practices; some pure and touching, others 


foolish and odious. These may all be briefly 


SECOND MEDITATION. 107 


comprised in the single expression, sacrifices. 
The history of all nations, barbarous or civil- 
ized, ancient or modern, teem with sacrificial — 
rites of every description, whether they be of a 
nature gross or mystical, of a performance mild 
or bloody; rites invented and celebrated either 
to expiate the sins of man, or to appease the 
anger of God and regain his favor. 

Nor is this all; we have here to note another 
moral fact, not less real although it seems 
stranger to the eyes of superficial reason. 
Mankind has believed that a fault might be 
expiated by another than its author, that inno- 
cent victims might be efficaciously offered up to 
influence God, and to save the guilty. This 
belief has led to sacrifices no less absurd than 
atrocious: the pretended expiation has become 
an additional crime: it has at the same time 
been also the source of heroic acts and sublime 
examples of self-devotion. Both the domestic 
records of families and the public histories of 


nations have furnished us with admirable © 


108 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 
4 


‘nstances of innocence voluntarily offering itself 
as a sacrifice, taking upon itself the penalty, 
the suffering, the death, to expiate the sin of 
others, and to win from Divine J ustice—now 
satisfied—the pardon of the offender. 

And are -we then to regard this merely as a 
pious, a generous illusion, a devotedness as vain 
as admirable? Yes, such is the view that all 
those must adopt who believe neither in Provi- 
dence nor prayer, nor in the existence of any 
efficacious relation between the actions of man 
and the purposes of God; no solidarity between 
men, no connection between the sacrifice of him 
who practices the act of selfdevotion, and the 
destiny of him who is its object. But those 
who have faith in the living God, in his con- 
tinued presence, and his never-sleeping provi- 
dence, those who believe that nothing in man, 
whether it be good or whether it be evil, is in 
vain, that every moral act bears its fruit vis- 
ible or invisible, immediate or remote, such as 


these cannot fail to feel, to have, as it were, @ 


ee SECOND MEDITATION. 109 
& 


presentiment, that in such self-sacrifice of the 
innocent for the salvation of the guilty, there 
exists a mysterious virtue. The secret of this 
it may not. be given them to fathom, but it 
nevertheless gives life in their bosom to the 
hope that such sublime devotion will not fail 
of its object. * 

And now, to pass from this feeling, and from 
the acts of man, whose reality no one can dis- 
pute, to the corresponding dogmas of Christian- 
ity, let me, by the side of these acts of devot- 
edness and self-sacrifice of the human creature ~ 
in his innocence seeking to atone for the sins of 
the human creature who is guilty, place the 
self-devotion and self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ, 
the Man-God, tendered to ransom from sin the 
race of mankind and to open to it the way of 
salvation; who is not struck by this sublime 
analogy? What connection and harmony be- 
tween the purest, the most generous, instincts 
of the human soul, and the dogma of God’s 


redemption? I touch upon none of the ques- 


110 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


tions, I enter into none of the controversies 
which have sprung up with respect to this 
dogma of redemption ; Ido not weigh with a 
view to compare faith and works, nor do I 
essay to assign the part due to divine grace or 
to human virtue; I do not define or seek to 
number the elect, but I pause*upon the fact 
itself of the redemption by Jesus Christ, the 
fact upon which the dogma itself reposes. All 
that the most renowned heroes, the most glori- 
ous saints of humanity, have striven to accom- 
plish, in order to expiate the sins of any 
creature or any nation, Jesus Christ the Elect 
of God, the Son of God, the God-Man, came to 
effect for all mankind, by means of incompara- 
ble sorrow, humiliation, and sufferings. And, 
as was affirmed by St. Paul in the first century, 
and by Bossuet in the seventeenth, this very 
suffering, this humiliation, this martyrdom of 
Jesus Christ, have constituted his victory and 
his empire. And I would ask, What other 


spectacle than that of God made man to con- 


SECOND MEDITATION. 111 


stitute himself victim—made victim to become 
the Saviour—could have excited in the soul 
of mankind those outbursts of admiration, of 
respect, and love, that ardent, invincible, and 
contagious faith of which the apostles and the 
primitive Christians have left us the evidences 
and the example? It was requisite that the 
victim and the sacrifice should be equal to the 
work. That work was the Christian religion, 
that incomparable system of facts, dogmas, 
precepts, promises, which, in the midst of all 
the doubts and all the controversies of the 
mind of man, have for nineteen centuries 
afforded satisfaction and solution to those 
aspirings of the human race which nature 
prompts, whether they assume the form of 


religious instincts or religious problems. 


THIRD MEDITATION. 


THE SUPERNATURAL. 


To a system so grand, and in such profound 
harmony with man’s own nature, an objection 
is made which is thought decisive; that system 
proclaims the supernatural, has the supernat- 
ural for its principle and foundation. It is 
objected that the supernatural itself has no 
existence. 

This objection is not novel, but it has at this 
moment in appearance assumed a more serious 
and formidable shape than ever. It is in the 
name of science itself, of all the human 
sciences, of the physical sciences, historical 
science, philosophical science, that the preten- 
sion is made that is to reduce the supernatural 


to a nonentity, and to banish it from the world 


and from man. 


THIRD MEDITATION. 1138 


* * 
The reverence that I feel for science is infi- 


nite. I would have it as free and unshackled as 
I would desire to see it honored. But I would 
at the same time like to see it deal somewhat 
more rigorously and logically with itself. I 
would like to see it less exclusively absorbed 
by its own peculiar labors and occupations, its 
momentary successes; more careful not to for- 
get or omit any of the ideas or any of the facts 
which bear upon the subject with which it 
deals, and for which in its solution it has stil] 
to account. 

In whatever quarter, at this day, the wind 
may be, the abolition of the Supernatural is a 
difficult enterprise, for the belief in the Super- 
natural is a fact natural, primitive, universal, 
constant in the life and history of the human 
race. We may interrogate mankind in all 
times and places, in all states of society and 
degrees of civilization, we find it always and 
_ everywhere spontaneously believing in facts 


and causes beyond the sphere of this palpable 
8 


114 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


world, of this living piece of mechanism termed 
nature. In vain do we extend, explain, amplify 
nature itself; the instinct of man, the instinct 
of human masses, has never suffered that nature 
to confine it: it has always sought and seen 
something beyond. 

It is this belief—instinctive, and hitherto in- 
destructible-—which is qualified as a radical 
error; this universal and enduring fact in man’s 
history it is which men seek to abolish. They 
go further; they affirm that it is already abol- 
ished; that the people no longer believe in the 
Supernatural; and that any attempt to bring 
them back to it would be vain. Incredible 
conceit of man! What, because in a corner of 
the world in one day among ages brilliant 
progress may have been made in natural and 
historical science; because in the name of the 
sciences, and in brilliant books, the Super- 
natural has been combated, they proclaim the 
Supernatural vanquished, abolished; and we 


hear the judgment pronounced, not merely in 


THIRD MEDITATION. 115 


the name of the learned, but of the people ! 
Have you then completely forgotten, or have 
you never thoroughly comprehended humanity 
and the history of humanity? Do you ignore 
absolutely what the people really is, and what 
all those nations are that cover the surface of 
the earth? Have you never then penetrated 
into those millions of souls in which the belief 
in the Supernatural is and abides, present and 
active even when the words which move their 
lips disown it? Are you then unconscious of 
the immense distance which there js between 
the depths and the surface of those souls, 
between the. variable breaths which only ruffle 
the minds of men, and the immutable instincts 
which preside over their very beng? True, 
there are, in our days, among the people, many 
fathers, mothers, children, who believe them- 
selves incredulous, and mock scornfully at mira- 
cles; but follow them in the intimacy of their 
homes, among the trials of their lives, how do 


these parents act when their child is ill, those 


116 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


farmers when their crops are threatened, those 
sailors when they float upon the waters a prey 
‘to the tempest ? They elevate their eyes to 
heaven, they burst forth in prayer, they invoke 
that Supernatural power said by you to be 
abolished in their very thought. By their 
spontaneous and irresistible acts they give to 
your words and to their own a striking disa- 
vowal. 

But to advance a step toward you, admitted 
that the faith in the Supernatural is abolished ; 
let us enter together that society and those 
classes to whom this moral ruin is a triumph 
and a vaunt. What then ensues? In the 
place of God’s miracles, man’s miracles make 
their appearance. They are searched for; they 
are called for; men are found to invent them, 
and to contrive them to be recognized by thonu- 
sands of beholders. It is not necessary to go 
either far in time or wide in space to see the 
Supernatural of Superstition raising itself in 


the place of the Supernatural of Religion, and 


THIRD MEDITATION. 117 


Credulity hurrying to meet Falsehood half- 
way. | 
But away with these unhealthy paroxysms 
of humanity; and to return to its sober and 
enduring history. We will admit that the 
instinctive belief in the Supernatural has been 
the source and abides the foundation of all 
religions, of religion in the most general sense 
of the word, and of essential religion. The 
most serious, at the same time the most per- 
plexed, of the thinkers who in our days have 
approached the subject, M. Edmond Scherer, 
saw plainly enough that that was the question 
at issue, and he has so put it in the third of his 
“Conversations Théologiques,” noble yet sad 
imaging forth of the fermentation in his own 
ideas and the struggles which they oceasion in 
his soul. “The Supernatural is not a some- 
thing external to religion,” says one of the two 
speakers between whom M. Scherer supposes 
the discussion, “it is religion itself” “ No,” 
says the other, “the Supernatural is not the 


ee 


118 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.~ 


peculiar element of religion, but rather of su- 
perstition: the Supernatural fact has no rela- 
tion with the human soul, for it is the essence 
of the Supernatural that it goes beyond all 
those conditions which constitute credibility ; 
its essence indeed is the being anti-human.” 
The discussion continues and becomes ani- 
mated: the contrary nature of the perplexities 
experienced by the two speakers becomes mani- 
fest. ‘‘ Perhaps,” says the Rationalist, “the 
Supernatural was a necessary form of religion 
for ill-cultivated minds; but rightly or wrong- 
ly, our modern civilization rejects miracles ; 
without positive denial, it remains indifferent 
to them. Even the preacher knows not how 
to deal with them; the more he is in earnest, 
the more his Christian feeling has inwardness 
and vitality, the more does the miracle also 
disappear from his teaching. Miracles for- 
merly constituted the great force of the ser- 
mon; at the present day what are they but a 


secret source of embarrassment 2 Everybody 


= THIRD MEDITATION. 119 


feels vaguely when confronted by the marvel- 
ous accounts In our sacred volumes, what he 
feels when confronted by the Legends of the 
Saints ; it is impossible for that to be religion, 
it is only its superfcetation.” “It is true,” ex- 
claims with sorrow the hesitating Christian, 
“we believe no longer in miracles; you might 
have added that neither do we any more 
believe in God himself; the two things go 
together. We hear much nowadays of Chris- 
tian Spiritualism, of the religion of the con- 
science, and you yourself seem to see that men 
in giving up miracles are making progress in 
religion. Ah! why is it that the intimate ex- 
perience of my own heart cannot express itself 
in a forcible protest against any such opinion ? 
Whenever I find’my faith in miraculous agency 
vacillating within me, the image of my God 
seems to be fading away from my eyes: He 
ceases to be for me God the free, the living, 
the personal; the God with whom the soul 


converses, as with a master and friend; and 


120 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


this holy dialogue ion interrupted, what is 
left us? How does life become sad ? how does 
it lose its allusions? Reduced to the satisfac- 
tion of mere physical wants, to eat, to drink, to _ 
sleep, to make money, deprived of all horizon, 
how puerile does our maturity appear, how 
sorrowful our old age, how meaningless our 
anxieties ! # 

“No more mystery, no more innocence, no 
more infinity, no longer any heaven above our 
heads, no more poesy. Ah! be sure; the incre- 
dulity which rejects the miracle has a tendency 
to unpeople heaven, and to disenchant the 
earth. The Supernatural is the natural sphere 
of the soul. It is the essence of its faith, of its 
hope, of its love. I know how specious criticism 
is, how victorious its arguments often appear; 
but I know one thing besides, and perhaps I 
might here even appeal to your own testimony ; 
in ceasing to believe in what is miraculous the 
soul finds that it has lost the secret of divine 


life; henceforth it is urged downward toward 


THIRD MEDITATION. 121 
PA 


the abyss, soon it lies on the earth, and not sel- 
dom in the dirt.” 

In his turn the disbeliever in the Supernatural 
is troubled and saddened. “Listen,” he Says ; 
“the history of humanity seems to be some- 
times moving in obedience to the following 
scheme. The world begins with religion, and, 
referring all phenomena to a first cause, it 
sees God everywhere. Then comes philosophy, 
which, having discovered the connection of sec: 
ondary causes, and the laws of their operation, 
makes a corresponding deduction from the 
direct intervention of divinity, and then found- 
ing itself upon the idea of necessity, (for it is 
only necessity which falls within the domain of 
science, and science is in fact but the knowledge 
of what is necessary ;) philosophy tends in its 
very fundamental principle to exclude God 
from the world. It does more; it finishes by 
denying human liberty as it has denied God. 
The reason is evident; liberty is a cause beyond 


the sphere of the necessary connection of 


1292 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


causes, a first cause, a cause which serves as 
cause to itself; and from that moment philos- 
ophy, unequal to any explanation, feels itself 
disposed to deny that first cause. A philosophy 
true $0 itself will ever be fatalistic. For from 
that moment philosophy corrupts and destroys 
itself. When it has no other God than the 
universe, no other man than the chief of the 
mammalia, what is it but a mere system of 
Zoology? Zoology constitutes the whole sci- 
ence of the epoch of the Materialists, and to 
speak plainly, that is our position at the present 
day. But Materialism can never be the be-all 
and the end-all of the human race. Corrupt 
and enervated, society is passing through im- 
-mense catastrophes, is falling in ruins : the iron 
harrow of revolution is breaking up mankind 
like the clods of the field ; in the bloody furrows 
germinate new races; the soul in the agony of 
its distress believes once more; it resumes its 
faith in virtue, it finds again the language 


of prayer. To the age of the Renaissance 


THIRD MEDITATION. 123 


succeeded that of the Reformation ; to the Ger- 
many of Frederick the Great, the Germany of 
1812. So faith springs up for ever and ever out 
ofits ashes. Ah, that I must add it, humanity 
rises again but to resume the march which I 
have just described. But can it be said of it 
besides, that like this globe of ours it is making 
any movement in advance while it is so turning 
round itself, and if it does so advance, toward 
what is it gravitating ? 


‘Whither, whither, O Lord, marches the earth in the 
heavens?” * 


But it is not toward heaven that the earth 
would march if it followed the path in which 
the adversaries of the Supernatural are impel- 
ling it. It is this peculiarity, they say, of the 
Supernatural, that being incredible, it is in its 
very essence anti-human. Now it is precisely to 
something not anti-human but superhuman that 


the human soul aspires, and there seeks to real- 


* Mélange de Critique Religieuse, par Edmond Scherer—Con- 
versations Théologiques, pp. 169-187. 


124 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


ize these aspirations in the Supernatural. We 
should be never weary of repeating it; the 
whole finite world in its entirety, with all its 
facts and all its laws, comprising indeed man 
himself, suffices not for the soul of man; it re- ‘ 
quires something grander and more perfect for 
the subject of its contemplation, the object of | 
its love; it desires to fix its trust in something 
more stable; to lean upon something less fra- 
gile. This supreme and sublime ambition it is 
to which religion, in its widest sense, gives 
birth and supplies nourishment; and this su- 
preme and sublime ambition it is also that the 
religion of Christ more particularly responds to 
and satisfies. Let those, therefore, who flatter 
themselves that although abolishing the belief 
in the Supernatural, they leave Christians still 
Christians, undeceive themselves; what they 
are abolishing, destroying, is very religion, for 
their arguments assail all religion in general, 
and Christianity in particular. It may be that 


they do not inflict upon themselves all this evil, — 


THIRD MEDITATION. 125 


‘and that in retaining a sincere religious senti- 
ment they really believe themselves nearly 
Christians; the soul struggles against the errors 
of the thought, and a moral suicide is a rare 
spectacle. But the evil even in spreading un- 
vails more plainly its nature and increases in 
intensity; besides, men, in masses, draw from - 
error far more logical conclusions than the man 
ever did in whom the error had its origin. The 
people are not the learned, neither are they 
philosophers; and only once succeed in destroy- 
ing in them all faith in the Supernatural, and 
you may consider it certain that the faith in 
Christ must have previously disappeared. 
Have you well weighed all this? Have you 
pictured to yourself what a man, what mankind, 
what the soul of man, what human society 
itself would become if religion were in effect 
abolished, if religious faith entirely disap- 
peared? I will not give way to anguish of 
soul or sinister presentiments, but I do not hes- 


itate to affirm that no imagination can represent 


126 . THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


with adequate fidelity what would take place 
in us and around us if the place at present oc- 
cupied by Christian belief were on a sudden to 
become vacant, and its empire annihilated. 
No one could pronounce to what degree of dis- 
order and degradation humanity would be pre- 
cipitated. But awful indeed would be the 
result if all faith in the Supernatural were ex- 
tinct in the soul, and if man had in a supernat- 
ural state neither trust nor hope. 

It is not my design, however, to confine 

myself here to the question regarded merely in 
its moral, practical light ; I approach the super- 
natural as viewed with the eyes of free and 
speculative reason. : 
’ It is condemned for its very name’s sake. 
Nothing is or can be, it is said, beyond and 
above nature. Nature is one and complete ; 
everything is comprised in it; in it, of neces- 
sity, all things cohere, enchain, and develop 
themselves. 


We are here in thorough pantheism; that is 


THIRD MEDITATION. . 127 
* 


to say, in absolute atheism. I do not hesitate 
to give to pantheism its real name. Among 
the men who at the present day declare them- 
selves the opponents of the Supernatural, most, 
certainly, do not believe that they are nor do 
they desire to be atheists. But let me tell 
them that they are leading others whither they 
neither think nor wish themselves to go. ‘The 
negation of the Supernatural, and that in the 
name of the unity and universality of nature, 
is pantheism, and pantheism is nothing more 
nor less than atheism. In the sequel of these 
Meditations, when I come to speak particularly 
of the actual state of the Christian religion, 
and of the different systems which combat it, I 
will in this respect justify my assertion; at 
present, I have to repel direct attacks upon the 
Supernatural; attacks less fundamental than 
those of pantheism, but not less serious, for in 
truth, whether men know it or not, and whether 
they mean it or not, all attacks in this warfare 


reach the same object, and as soon as the Super- 


% 


128 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


natural is the aim, it is religion itself that 
receives the shaft. 

The fixity of the laws of nature is appealed 
to; that, say they, is the palpable and incon- 
testible fact established by the experience of 
mankind, and upon which rests the conduct of 
human life. In presence of the permanent 
order of nature and the immutability of its 
laws, we cannot admit any partial, any mo- 
mentary infractions; we cannot believe in the 
Supernatural, in miracles. 

True, general and constant Jaws do govern 
nature. Are we, therefore, to affirm that those 
laws are necessary, and that no deviation from 
them is possible in nature? Who is there that 
does not discern an essential, an absolute differ- 
ence between what is general and what is nec- 
essary? ‘The permanence of the actual laws of 
nature is a fact established by experience, but 
it is not the only fact possible, the only fact 
conceivable by reason; those laws might have 


been other laws—they may change. Several 


THIRD MEDITATION. ; 129 


of them have not always been what they now 


are, for science itself proves that the condition 
of the universe has been different from what it 
is at present; the universal and permanent 
order of which we form part, and in which we 
confide, has not always been what we now see 
it; it has had a beginning; the creation of the 
actual system of nature and of its laws is a fact 
as certain as the system itself is certain. And 
what is creation but a supernatural fact, the act 
of a Power superior to the actual laws of 
nature, and which has power to modify them 
just as much as it has had power to establish 
them? The first of miracles is God himself. 
There is a second miracle—man. I resume 
what I have already said; by his title as a 
moral being and free agent, man lives beyond 
and above the influence of the general and per- 
manent laws of nature; he creates by his will 
effects which are not at all the necessary conse- | 
quence of any pre-existent law; and those 


effects take their place in a system absolutely 
9 


ae oo 
ter, 


A 
130 © ‘THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


Tes 


distinct and independent from the visible order 
which governs the universe. The moral lib- 
erty of man is a fact as certain, and natural, as 
- the order of nature, and it is at the same time 
a supernatural fact—that is to say, essen- 
tially foreign to the order of nature and to its 
laws. 

God is the being moral and free par excel- 
lence; that is to say, the being excellently capa- 
ble of acting as first cause beyond the influence 
of causation. By his title as a moral being 
and free agent, man is in intimate relation with 
God. Who shall define the possible contin- 
gencies, or fathom the mysteries of this rela- 
tion? Who dare to say that God cannot 
modify, that he never does modify, according 
to his plans with respect to the moral system 
and to man, the laws which he has made and 
which he maintains in the material order of 
nature 2 

Some have hesitated absolutely to deny the 


possibility of supernatural facts; and so their 


rod : ‘ 
THIRD MEDITATION. ‘ 13) 
'* 


attack is indirect. If those facts, say they, are 
not impossible, they are incredible, for no par- 
ticular testimony of man in favor of a miracle 
can give a certitude equal to that which, on 
the opposite side, results from the experience 
which men have of the fixity of the laws of 
nature. 

“It is experience only,” says Hume, “which 
- gives authority to human testimony ; and it is 
the same experience which assures us of. the 
laws of nature. When therefore these two 
kinds of experience are contrary, we have 
nothing to do but subtract the one from the 
other, and embrace an opinion, either on one 
side or the other, with that assurance which 
arises from the remainder. But according to 
the principles here explained, this subtraction, 
with regard to all popular religions, amounts to 
an entire annihilation: and therefore we may 
establish it as a maxim, that no human testi- 
mony can have such force as to prove a miracle, 


and make it a just foundation for any such SYS- 


132 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


tem of religion.”* It is in this reasoning of 
Hume that the opponents of miracles shut 
themselves up as in an impregnable fortress 
to refuse them all credence. 

What confusion of facts and ideas! What 
a superficial solution of one of the grandest 
problems of our nature! What! a simple 
operation of arithmetic, with respect to two 
experimental observations, estimated in ciphers, 
is to decide the question whether the universal 
belief of the race of man in the Supernatural 
is well-founded or simply absurd; whether God 
only acts upon the world and upon man by 
laws established once for all, or whether he 
still continues to make, in the exercise of his 
power, use of his liberty! Not only does the 


skeptic Hume here show himself unconscious 


of the grandeur of the problem; he mistakes ~ 


even in the motives upon which he founds 


* Egsays and Treatises on Several Subjects, by David Hume ; 
Essay on Miracles, vol. iii, pp. 119-145, Bale, 1793. [Same 
work, p. 91, London, 16mo., 1860.—Transtaror. ] 


- 
THIRD MEDITATION. ' 133 


his shallow conclusion; for it is not from 
human experience alone that human testimony 
draws her authority: this authority has sources 
more profound, and a worth anterior to. expe- 
rience: it is one of the natural bonds, one of the 
spontaneous sympathies which unite with one 
another men and the generations of men. Is 
it by virtue of experience that the child trusts 
to the words of its mother, that it has faith 
in all she tells it? The mutual trust that men 
repose In what they say or transmit to each 
other is an instinct, primitive, spontaneous, 
which experience confirms or shakes, sets up 
again or sets bounds to, but which experience 
does not originate. 

I find in the same essay of Hume®* this 
other passage: “The passion of surprise and 
wonder, arising from miracles, being an agree- 
able emotion, gives a sensible tendency toward 
the belief of those events from which it is 


derived.” 


* Hume’s Essay on Miracles, p. 128, ui supra. 


134 ne RELIGION. 


Thus, if we are able to credit Hume, it 1s 
merely for his pleasure, for the diversion of 
the imaginative faculty, that man believes in 
the Supernatural; and beneath this impression 
—though real, still only a secondary nature— 
which does no more than skim the surface of 
the human soul, the philosopher has no glimpse 
at all of the profound instincts and superior 
requisitions which have sway over him. 

But why an attack of this character, so in- 
direct and little complete? Why should 
Hume limit himself to the proposition that 
miracles can never be historically proved, 
instead of at once affirming the impossibility 
of miracles themselves? This is what the op- 
ponents of the Supernatural virtually think; 
and it is because they commence by regarding 
miracles as impossible that they apply them- 
selves to destroy the value of the evidences 
by which they are supported. If the evidence 
which surrounds the cradle of Christianity, if 


the fourth, if even the tenth part of it were 


THIRD MEDIT ATION, 135 


adduced in support of facts of a nature extra- 
ordinary, unexpected, or unheard-of, but. still 
not having a character positively supernatural, 
the proof would be accepted as unexception- 
able: the facts for certain. In appearance, it 
is merely the proof by witnesses of the Super- 
natural that is contested; whereas, in reality, 
the very possibility of the thing is denied that 
is sought to be proved. The question ought 
to be put as it really is, instead of such a solu- 
tion being offered as is a mere evasion. 

Lately, however, men of logical minds and 
daring spirits have not hesitated to speak more 
frankly and plainly. “The new dogma, they 
say, the fundamental principle of criticism, is 
the negation of the Supernatural. . . . Those 
still disposed to reject this principle have 
nothing to do with our books, and we, on our 
side, have no cause to feel disquietude at their 
opposition and their censure, for we do not 
write for them. And if this discussion is alto- 


gether avoided, it is because it is impossible to 


‘we 


THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


enter into it without admitting an unacceptable 
proposition, namely, one which presumes that 
the Supernatural can in any given case be 
possible.* 

I do not reproach the disciples of the school 
of Hume for having evinced greater timidity: 
if they attacked the Supernatural by a side 
way, not as being impossible in itself, but as 
being merely incapable of proof by human 
testimony, they did not do-so designedly and 
with deceitful purpose. Let us render them 
more justice, and do them more honor. A 


prudent and an honest instinct held them back 


on the declivity upon which they had placed. 


themselves; they felt that to deny even the 
possibility of the Supernatural was to enter 
at full sail into pantheism and fatalism, that 
is to say, was the same thing as at once dis- 


pensing with God and doing away with the 


* Conservation, Révolution, et Positivisme, par M. Littré, 
Preface, p. xxvi, and the following pages—M, Havet, Revue des 
Deux Mondes, 1 Aoft, 1863. 


a 
THIRD MEDITATION. 187 


free agency of man. Their moral sense, their 
good sense, withheld them from any such course. 
The fundamental error of the adversaries of 
the Supernatural is that they contest it in the 
name of human science, and that they class 
the Supernatural among facts within the do- 
main of science, whereas the Supernatural 
does not fall within that domain, and the very 
attempt so to treat it has led, indeed, to its 


being entirely rejected. 


FOURTH MEDITATION. 


THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE. 


AN eminent moralist, who was at the same 
time not only a theologian, but a philosopher 


well versed in the physical sciences, I mean 
Dr. Chalmers, professor at the University of 
Edinburgh, and corresponding member of the 


Institute of France, wrote in his work on JVat-— 


ural Theology a chapter entitled, On man’s 
partial and limited knowledge of divine things. 
The first pages are as follows: 
“The true modern philosophy never makes 
more characteristic exhibition of itself, than at 
the limit which separates the known from the 
unknown. It is there that we behold it in a 
twofold aspect—that of the utmost deference 
and respect for all the findings of experience 


within this mit; that, on the other hand, of 


~ 


FOURTH MEDITATION. 139 


the utmost disinclination and distrust for all 
those fancies of ingenious or plausible specula- 
tion which have their place in the ideal region 
beyond it. To call in the aid of a language 
which far surpasses our own in expressive 
brevity, its office is ‘indagare’ rather than 
‘divinare’ The products of this philosophy 
are copies and not creations. It may discover 
a system of nature, but not devise one. It 
proceeds first on the observation of individual 
facts; and if these facts are ever harmonized 
into a system, this is only in the exercise of a 
more extended observation. In the work of 
systematizing, it makes no excursion beyond the 
territory of actual nature—for they are the 
actual phenomena of nature which form the 
first materials of this philosophy—and they 
are the actual resemblances of these phenomena 
that form, as it were, the cementing principle, 
to which the goodly fabrics of modern science 
owe all the solidity and all the endurance that 
belong tothem. It is this chiefly which distin- 


% 


140 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


guishes the philosophy of the present day from 
that of bygone ages. The one was mainly an 
excogitative, the other mainly a descriptive 
process—a description, however, extending to 
the likenesses as well as to the peculiarities of 
things; and, by means of these observed like- 
nesses alone, often realizing a more glorious and 
magnificent harmony than was ever pictured 
forth by all the imaginations of the theorists. 

“In the mental characteristics of this philos- 
ophy, the strength of a full-grown understand- 
ing is blended with the modesty of childhood. 
The ideal is sacrificed to the actual; and, how- 
ever splendid or fondly cherished a hypothesis 
may be, yet if but one phenomenon in the real 
history of nature stand in the way, it is forth- 
with and conclusively abandoned. To some 
the renunciation may be as painful as the cut- 
ting off a right hand, or the plucking out a 
right eye; yet, if true to the great principle 
of the Baconian school, it must be submitted 


to. With its hardy disciples one valid proof 


FOURTH MEDITATION. 141 


outweighs a thousand plausibilities; and the 
resolute firmness wherewith they bid away the 
speculations of fancy is only equaled by the 
childlike compliance wherewith they submit 
themselves to the lessons of experience. 

“Tt is thus that the same principle which 
guides to a just and a sound philosophy in all 
that lies within the circle of human discovery, 
leads also to a most unpresuming and unpro- 
nouncing modesty in reference to all that lies 
beyond it. And should some new light spring 
up on this exterior region, should the informa- 
tion of its before hidden mysteries break in 
upon us from some quarter that was before 
inaccessible, it will be at once perceived (on 
the supposition of its being a genuine and not 
an illusory light) that, of all other men, they 
are the followers of Bacon and Newton who 
should pay the most unqualified respect to all 
its revelations. In their case it comes upon 
minds which are without prejudice, because on 


that very principle, which is most characteristic 


7 a | > i _- © ‘YY 
* — ¥, 
* 


45 “Yee 
p Oe ge 
he ah * * 
142 * THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 


of our modern science, upon minds without pre- | 
occupation. . . . The strength of his confi- 
dence in all the ascertained facts of the terra 
cognita is at one or in perfect harmony with 
the humility of his diffidence in regard to 
all the conceived plausibilities of the terra 
encognita. 

“ And let it further be remarked of the self: 
denial which is laid upon us by Bacon’s Philos- 
ophy, that, like all other self-denial in the cause 
of truth or virtue, it hath its reward. In giv- 
ing ourselves up to its guidance, we have often 
to quit the fascinations of beautiful theory ; 
but in exchange for them, we are at length 
regaled by the higher and substantial beauties - 
of actual nature. There is a stubbornness in 
facts before which the specious imagination is 
compelled to give way; and perhaps the mind 
never suffers more painful laceration than when, 
after having vainly attempted to force nature 
into a compliance with her own splendid gen- 


eralizations, she, on the appearance of some 


"143 
» 2 ; 
rebellious and impracticable phenomenon, has 


to practice a foree upon herself—when she thus 
finds the goodly speculation superseded by the 
homely and unwelcome experience. It seemed 
at the outset a cruel sacrifice, when the world 
of speculation, with all its manageable and 
engaging simplicities, had to be abandoned; 
and on becoming the pupils of observation, we, 
amid the varieties of the actual world around 
us, felt as if bewildered, if not lost, among the 
perplexities of a chaos. This was a period of 
greatest sufferance; but it has had a glorious 
termination. In return for the assiduity where- 
with the study of nature hath been prosecuted, 
she hath made a more abundant revelation of 
her charms. Order hath arisen out of con- 
fusion, and in the ascertained structure of the 
universe there are now found to be a state and 
a sublimity beyond all that was ever pictured 
by the mind in the days of her adventurous 
and unfettered imagination. Even viewed in 


the light of a noble and engaging spectacle for 


144 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

the fancy to dwell sivontteaha would ever think 
of comparing with the system of Newton, either 
that celestial machinery of Des Cartes, which 
was impelled by whirlpools of ether, or that 
still more cumbrous planetarium of cycles and 
epicycles which was the progeny of a remoter 
age? It is thus that at the commencement of 
the observational process there is the abjura- 
tion of beauty. But .it soon reappears in 
another form, and brightens as we advance, 
and at length there arises on solid foundation 
a fairer and goodlier system than ever floated 
in airy romance before the eye of genius. Nor 
is it difficult to perceive the reason of this. 
What we discover by observation is the 
product of divine imagination bodied forth by 
creative power into a stable and enduring real- 
ity. What we devise by our own ingenuity is 
but the product of human imagination. The 
one is the solid archetype of those concep- 
tions which are in the mind of God: the 


other is the shadowy representation of those 


+e 

FOURTH MEDITATION. 145 
conceptions which an in the mind of man. It 
is just as with the laborer, who, by excavating 
the rubbish which hides and besets some noble 
architecture, does more for the gratification of 
our taste than if by his unpracticed hand he 
should attempt to regale us with plans and 
sketches of his own. And so the drudgery of 
experimental science, in exchange for that 
beauty whose fascinations it withstood at the 
outset of its career, has evolved a surpassing 
beauty from among the realities of truth and 
nature... . 

“The views contemplated through the me- 
dium of observation are found not only to have 
a justness in them, but to have a grace and a 
grandeur in them far beyond all the visions 
which are contemplated through the medium 
of fancy, or which ever regaled the fondest 
enthusiast in the enchanted walks of specula- 
tion and poetry. But neither the grace nor 
the grandeur alone would, without evidence, 


have secured acceptance for any opinion. It 
/ 
10 


146 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


must first be made to undergo, and without 
ceremony, the freest treatment from human 
eyes and human hands. It is at one time 
stretched on the rack of an experiment, at 
‘another it has to pass through fiery trial in the 
bottom of a crucible. In another it undergoes 
a long questioning process among the fumes 
and the filtrations and the intense heat of a 
laboratory ; and not till it has been subjected 
to all this inquisitorial torture and survived it, 
is it preferred to a place in the temple of — 
Truth, or admitted among the laws and lessons 
of a sound philosophy.” 

No one certainly will contest that this is the 
language of a fervent disciple of science. It is 
impossible to have a keener apprehension of its 
beauty, and to accept more completely its laws. 
What mathematician, natural philosopher, phys- 
iologist, or chemist, could speak in terms of 
greater respect and submission of the necessity 
of observation, and of the authority of experi 


- ence? Dr. Chalmers is not the less for that a 


FOURTH MEDITATION. 147 


true and fervent Christian; his religious faith 
equals his scientific exactitude: he receives 
Christ, and professes Christ’s doctrine with as 
firm a voice as he does Bacon and Bacon’s 
method. Not that for him religious belief is the 
mere result of education, of tradition, of habit ; 
but it, on the contrary, springs as much from 
reflection and learning, as his acquirements in 
natural science themselves; in each sphere he 
has probed the very sources and weighed the 
motives of his convictions. How did he, in 
each instance, reach such a haven of repose ? 
Whence in him this harmony between the 
philosopher and the Christian ? 

Let us again allow Dr. Chalmers to speak 
for himself : 

“It is of importance here to remark that the 
enlargement of our knowledge in all the nat- 
ural sciences, so far from adding to our pre- 
sumption, should only give a profounder sense 
of our natural incapacity and ignorance in ref- 


erence to the science of theology. It is just as 


148 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


if in studying the policy of some earthly mon- 
arch we had made the before unknown discov- 
ery of other empires and distant territories 
whereof we knew nothing but the existence 
and the name. This might complicate the 
study without making the object of it at all 
more comprehensible, and so of every new 
wonder which philosophy might lay open to 
the gaze of inquirers. It might give us a 
larger perspective of the creation than before, 
yet, in fact, cast a deeper shade of obscurity _ 
over the counsels and ways of the Creator. 
We might at once obtain a deeper insight 
into the secrets of the workmanship, and yet 
feel, and legitimately feel, to be still more 
deeply out of reach, the secret purposes of Him 
who worketh all in all. Every discovery of an 
addition to the greatness of his works may 
bring with it an addition to the unsearchable- 
ness of his ways... . 

“That telescope which has opened our way 


to suns and systems. innumerable, leaves the 


FOURTH MEDITATION. 149 


moral administration connected with them in 
deepest secrecy. It has made known to us the 
bare existence of other worlds; but it would’ 
require another instrument of discovery ere we 
could understand their relation to ourselves, as 
products of the same Almighty Hand, as parts 
or members of a family under the same pater- 
nal guardianship. This more extended survey 
of the Material Universe just tells us how little 
we know of the Moral or Spiritual Universe. 
It reveals nothing to us of the worlds that roll 
in space, but the bare elements of Motion and 
Magnitude and Number, and so leaves us at a 
more hopeless distance from the secret of the 
Divine administration than when we reasoned 
of the Earth as the Universe, of our species as 
the alone rational family of God that he had 
implicated with body, or placed in the midst of 
a corporeal system. . . . | 

“To “know that we cannot know certain 
things is in itself positive knowledge, and a 


knowledge of the most safe and valuable na- 


b ‘a , 
gh? 


150 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. ae 
ture. ... There are few services of greater 
value to the cause of knowledge than the 
delineation of its boundaries.”* 

In holding this language, what in effect is 
Dr. Chalmers doing? He is separating what is 
finite from what is infinite, the thing created 
from the Creator, the world subject to govern- 
ment from the Sovereign that governs it; and 
in marking this line of demarcation, he says, in 
his modesty to science, what God in his power 
says to the ocean: “Thus far shalt thou go, 
and no further.” 

Dr. Chalmers was right; the limits of the 
finite world are those also of human science. 
How far within these vast limits science may 
extend her empire, who shall affirm? But 
what we certainly may assert is, that she never 
can exceed them. The finite world alone is 
within her reach, the only world that she can 
fathom. It is only in the finite world that 


* Chalmes’s Works: Natural Theology, pp. 249-265. Glas- 
gow. 


» a r 
* FOURTH MEDITATION. 151 


man’s mind can fully grasp the facts, observe 
them in all their extent, and under all their 
aspects, discriminate their relations and their 
Jaws, (which constitute also a species of facts,) 
and so verify the system to which they should 
be referred. This it is that makes what we 
term scientific processes and labor, and human 
sciences are the results. 

What need to mention that in speaking of 
the finite world I do not mean to speak of the 
material world alone? Moral facts there also 
are which fall under observation and enter into 
the domain of science. The study of man in 
his actual condition, whether considered as an 
individual or as forming a member of a nation, 
is also a scientific study, subject to the same 
method as that of the material world; and it is 
its legitimate province also to detect in the 
actual order of this world the laws of those par- 
ticular facts to which it addresses itself. 

But if the limits of the finite world are those 


of human science, they are not those of the 


152 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


human soul. Man contains in himself ideas and 
ambitious aspirations extending far beyond and 
rising far above the finite world, ideas of and 
aspirations toward the infinite, the ideal, the 
perfect, the immutable, the eternal. ‘These 
ideas and aspirations are themselves realities 
admitted by the human mind; but even in ad- 
mitting them man’s mind comes to a halt; they 
give him a presentiment of, or to speak with 
more precision, a revelation of an order of 
things different from the facts and laws of the 
finite world which lies under his observation . 
but while man has of this superior order the 
instinct and the perspective, he can have of it 
no positive knowledge. It proceeds from the 
sublimity of his nature if he has a glimpse of 
infinity, if he aspires to it; whereas it results 
from the infirmity of his actual condition if his 
positive knowledge is limited by the world in 
which he exists. 

I was born in the south, under the very sun. 


I have yet, for the most part, lived in regions 


FOURTH MEDITATION. 158 


either of the north, or bordering upon the north, 
regions so frequently immersed in mists. When 
under their pale sky we look toward the hori. 
zon a fog of greater or less density limits the 
view; the vision itself might penetrate much 
further, but an external obstacle arrests tyr it 
does not find there the light it needs, Regard 
now the horizon under the pure and brilliant 
sky of the south; the plains, distant as well as 
near, are bathed in light; the human eye can 
penetrate there as far as its organization per- 
mits. If it pierces no further, it is not for want 
of light, but because its proper and natural 
force has attained its limit. The mind knows 
that there are spaces beyond that which the 
eye traverses, but the eye penetrates them not. 
This is an image of what happens to the mind 
itself when contemplating and studying the 
universe. It reaches a point where its clear 
sight, that is to say, its positive appreciation, 
halts, not that it finds there the end of things 


themselves, but the limit of man’s scientific 


154 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


appreciation of them; other realities present 
themselves to him; he has a glimpse of them; 
he believes in them spontaneously and naturally ; 
it is not given to him to grasp them and to 
measure them; but he can neither ignore them 
nor know them, neither have positive knowl- 
edge of them, nor refrain from having faith in 
them. 

I cannot deny myself the pleasure of citing 
what I wrote thirteen years ago upon the same 
subject, when philosophically examining the real 
meaning of the word faith. “ The object of 
every religious belief,” said I, “is in a certain, a 
large measure, inaccessible to human science. 
Human science may establish that object's real- 
ity; it may arrive at the boundary of this mys- 
terious world, and assure itself of the existence 
there of facts with which man’s destiny 1s con- 
nected; but it is not given to it so to attain the 
facts themselves as to subject them to its exam- 


ination. 
“Their incapacity to do so has struck more 


FOURTH MEDITATION. 155 


than one philosopher, and has led them to the 
conclusion that no such reality exists, that 
every religious belief contemplates subjects 
simply chimerical. Others, shutting their eyes 
to their own incompetency, have dashed dar- 
ingly forward toward the sphere of the Super- - 
natural; and just as if they had succeeded in 
penetrating into it, they have described its facts, 
resolved its problems, assigned its laws. It is 
difficult to say who shows more foolish arro- 
gance, the man who maintains that that of 
which he cannot have positive knowledge has 
no real existence, or the man who pretends to 
be able to know everything that actually exists, 
However this may be, mankind has never for a 
single day assented to either assertion. Man’s 
instincts and his actions have constantly dis- 
avowed both the negation of the disbeliever 
and the confidence of the theologian. In spite 
of the former, he has persisted in believing in 
the existence of the unknown world, and in 


the reality of the relations which connect him 


156 THE CHRISTIAN en 

with it; and notwithstanding the powerful 
influences of the latter, he has refused to admit 
their having attained their object—raised the 
vail; and so man has continued to agitate the 
same problems, to pursue the same truths, as 
ardently and as laboriously as at the first day, 
just as if nothing had been done at all." 

I have just read again the excellent com- 
pendium given by M. Cousin in his General 
History of Philosophy from the most Ancient 
Times to the End of the Highteenth Century. 
He establishes that all the philosophical labors 
of the human understanding have terminated 
in four great systems—sensualism, idealism, 
skepticism, and mysticism—the sole actors in 
that intellectual arena where, in all ages and | 
among all nations, they are in turn in the posi- - 
tion of combatants and of sovereigns. And, 
after having clearly characterized in their 
origin and their development these_ four sys- 
tems, M. Cousin adds, “As for their intrinsic 


* Méditations et Etudes Morales, p. 170. Paris, 1851. 


' FOURTH MEDITATION. 157 
merits, habituate yourselves to this principle; 
they have existed; therefore they had . their 
reason to exist; therefore they are true at 
least in part. Error is the law of our nature : 
to it we are condemned; and in all our opinions 
and all our words there ig always a large 
allowance to be made for error, and too often 
for absurdity. But absolute absurdity does 
not enter into the mind of man; it is the ex- 
cellence of man’s thought, that without some 
leaven of truth it admits nothing, and absolute 
error is impossible. The four systems which 
have just been rapidly laid before you have 
had each their existence; therefore they contain 
truth, still without being entirely true. Par- 
tially true, and partially false, these systems 
reappear at all the great epochs. Time can- 
not destroy any one of them, nor can it beget 
any new one, because time develops and _per- 
fects the human mind, though without chang- 
ing its nature and its fundamental tendencies. 


Time does no more than multiply and vary 


158 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


almost infinitely the combinations of the four 
simple and elementary systems. Hence origin- 
ate those countless systems which history col- 
lects and which it is its office to explain.” * 

M. Cousin excels in explaining these num- 
berless philosophical combinations, and in trac- 
ing them all back to the four great systems 
which he has defined; but there is a fact still 
more important than the variety of these com- 
binations, and which calls itself for explanation. 
Why did these four essential systems, sensual- 
ism, idealism, skepticism, and mysticism, appear 
from the most ancient times? why have they 
continued to reproduce themselves always and 
every where, with deductions more or less 
logical, with greater or less ability, but still fun- 
damentally always and everywhere the same ¢ 
Why, upon these supreme questions, did the 


human mind achieve at so early a period what 


* Histoire Générale de la Philosophie depuis les temps les 
plus anciens jusqu’d la fin du XVIII Siécle, par M. Victor 
Cousin, pp. 4-31. 1863. 


FOURTH MEDITATION. 159 


may be termed, it is true, but essays at a solu- 
tion, but which essays in some sort have ex- 
hausted the mind rather than satisfied it 2 
How is it that these different systems, invented 
with such promptitude, have never been able 
either to come to an accord, nor has any one 
been able to prevail decidedly against another 
and to cause itself to be received as the truth ? 
Why has philosophy, or, to speak more pre- 
cisely, why have metaphysics, remained essen- 
tially stationary: great at their birth, but des- 
tined not to grow: whereas the other sclences 
—those styled natural sciences—have been 
essentially progressive: at first feeble, and 
making in succession conquest after conquest; 
these they have been able to retain, until they 
have formed a domain day by day more 
extended and less contested ? 

The very fact that suggests these questions 
contains the answer to them. Man has, upon 
the fundamental subject of metaphysics, a 


primitive light, rather the heritage and dowry 


ew /% . 


160 Merce CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

of human nature, than the conquest of human 
science. The metaphysician appropriates it as 
a torch to lighten him on his obscure and ill- 
defined path. He finds in man himself a point 
of departure at once profound and certain ; 
but his aim is God, that is to say, an aim above - 
his reach. 

Must we, then, renounce the study of the 
great questions which form the subject of 
metaphysics as a vain labor, where the human 
mind is turning indefinitely in the same circle, 
incapable not only of attaining the object which 
it is pursuing, but of making any advance in 
its pursuit ? 

Often, and with more ability than has been 
evinced by the Positive school of the present 
day, has this judgment been pronounced 
against metaphysics. But that judgment man’s 
mind has never accepted, and never will ac- 
cept; the great problems which pass beyond 
the finite world lie propounded before him; 


never will he renounce the attempt to solve 


FOURTH MEDITATION. ~~ 161 


them; he is impelled to it by an irresistible 
instinct, an instinct full of faith and of hope, 
in spite of the repeated failure of his efforts. 
As man is in the sphere of action, so is he also 
in that of thought; he aspires higher than it 
is possible to achieve: this is his nature and 
his glory; to renounce his aspirations would 
be declaring his own forfeiture. But without 
any such abdication, it is still necessary that 
he should know himself, it is necessary that 
he should understand that his strength here 
below is infinitely less than his ambition, and 
that it is not given him to have any positive 
scientific knowledge of that, infinite and ideal 
world toward which he dashes. The facts and 
the problems which he there encounters are 
such, that the methods and the laws which 
direct the human mind in the study of the 
finite world are inapplicable. The infinite is 
for us the object not of science but belief, and 
it is alike impossible for us either to reject 
or penetrate it. Let man, then, feel a pro- 
11 


162 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


found sentiment of that double truth: let him, 
without sacrificing the ambitious aspirations 
of his intelligence, recognize the limits imposed 
upon his achievements in science ; he will not 
then be long in also recognizing that, in the 
relations of the finite with the infinite—of him- 
self with God—he stands in need of super- 
human assistance, and that this does not fail 
him. God has given to man what man never 
can conquer, and revelation opens to him that 
world of the infinite over which, by his own 
exertions and of itself alone, man’s mind never 
could spread light. The light man receives 
from God himself. | 


FIFTH MEDITATION. 


REVELATION. 


WHEN it was objected to Leibnitz “that 
there is nothing in the intelligence that has 
not first been in’ the sense,” Leibnitz replied, 
“if not the intelligence itself.” * 

In the answer of Leibnitz I will change but — 
a single word, and substitute for entelligence, 
soul. Soul is a term more comprehensive and 
more complete than intelligence; it embraces 
everything in the human being that is not 
body and matter; it is not the mere intellj- 
gence, a special faculty of man; it is all the 
intellectual and moral man. 

The soul possesses itself and carries with it 


* Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu. Nisi 
intellectus ipse. 


164 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


into life native faculties and an inborn light: 
these manifest and develop themselves more 
and more as they come into relation with the 
exterior world; but they had still an existence 
prior to those relations, and they exercise an 
important influence upon what results, The 
external world does not create nor essentially 
change the intellectual and moral being that 
has just come into life, but 1t opens to it a 
stage where that being acts in accordance at 
once with its proper nature, and the conditions 
and influences in the midst of which the action 
takes place. The hypothesis of a statue en- 
dowed with sensibility is a contradiction; in 
seeking to explain man’s first growth, it loses 
sight of the entire intellectual and moral 
being. | 

When, as I said before, man first entered 
the world, he did not enter it, he could not 
enter it, as a new-born babe, with the mere 
breath of life; he was created full grown, with 


instincts and faculties complete in their power 


FIFTH MEDITATION. 165 


and capable of immediate action. We must 
either deny the creation and be driven to 
monstrous hypotheses, or admit that the human 
being who now developes himself slowly and 
laboriously, was at his first appearance mature 
in body and in mind. 

The creation implies then the revelation, a 
revelation which lighted man at his entrance 
into the world, and qualified him from that 
very moment to use his faculties and his in- 
stincts. Do we, can we, picture to ourselves 
the first man, the first human couple, with a 
complete physical development, and yet with- 
out the essential conditions of intellectual 
activity, physically strong and morally a non- 
entity, the body of twenty years and the soul 
in the first hour of infancy? Such a fatt is 
self-contradictory, and impossible of con- 
ception. | 

What was the positive extent of this primal 
revelation, the necessary attendant upon cre- 


ation, which occurred in the first relation of 


166 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


God with man? No man can say. I open 
the book of Genesis and there I read: 

“ And the Lord God took the man, and put 
him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to 
keep it. And the Lord God commanded the 
man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou 
mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the 
knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not 
eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest 
theredf thou shalt surely die. And the Lord 
God said, It is not good that the man should 
be alone; I will make him a help meet for 
him. And out of the ground the Lord God 
formed every beast of the field, and every 
fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam 
to see what he would call them: and whatso- 
ever. Adam called every living creature, that 
was the name thereof. And Adam gave 
names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, 
and to every beast of the field; but for Adam 
there was not found a help meet for him. 
And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall 


FIFTH MEDITATION. 167 


upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of 
his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof. 
And the rib, which the Lord God had taken 
from man, made he a woman, and brought her 
unto the man. And Adam said, This is now 
bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh... . 
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his 
mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and 
they shall be one flesh.”* According, then, to 
the Bible, the primitive revelation essentially 
bore upon the three points, marriage, language, 
and the duty of man’s obedience to God his 
Creator: Adam received at the hand of God 
the moral law of his liberty, the companion of 
his life, and the faculty by which he was 
enabled to name the creatures that were 
around him : in other words, the three sources 
of religion, of family, and of science were im- 
mediately unclosed to him. It is not necessary 
here to enter upon any of the questions which 
have been raised, as to the human origin of 


* Genesis ii, 15-24, 


/ 


168 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


language, the primitive language, or the 
formation of families, with their influence upon 
the great organization of society: the limits of 
the primitive revelation cannot be determined 
scientifically ; the fact of the revelation itself is 
certain. This is the light which lighted the 
first man from his first entrance upon life, and 
without which it is impossible to conceive that 
he could have survived. 

The primitive revelation did not abandon 
mankind on its development and dispersion ; 
it accompanied it everywhere, as a general and 
permanent revelation. The light which had 
lighted the first man spread among all nations 
‘and throughout all ages, assuming the charac- 
ter of ideas, universal and uncontested; of 
instincts, spontaneous and indestructible. No 
nation has been without this light, none left to 
its own unassisted efforts to grope its way 
through the darkness of life. Let not the 
human understanding pride itself too much 


upon its works; the glory does not belong to it 


FIFTH MEDITATION. 169 


alone: what it has accomplished it has accom- 
plished by aid of the primitive principles re- 
ceived from God; in all his works and all his 
progress man has had for point of departure 
and support that primitive revelation. All the 
grand doctrines, all the mighty institutions, 
which have governed the world, whatever inter- 
mixture of monstrous and fatal errors they may 
have contained, have preserved a trace of the 
fundamental verities which were the dowry of 
humanity at its birth. God has forsaken no 
portion of the human race; and not less amid 
the errors into which it has fallen than in the 
noble developments which constitute its glory, 
we recognize signs of the primitive teaching 
derived from its Divine Author. 

After the revelation made to the first man, 
and in the midst of the general revelation dif- 
fused over all mankind, a great event occurs in 
history: a special revelation takes place, and 
has for its seat the bosom of an inconsiderable 


nation, that had been shut in during sixteen 


170 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


centuries in a little corner of the world; and it 
was thence that, nineteen centuries ago, that 
revelation proceeded to enlighten and to sub- 
due, according to the predictions of its Author, 
all the human race. 

A man of an imagination as fertile as his 
knowledge is profound, who, with an admira- 
ble candor has in his works associated hypothe- 
sis and faith, M. Ewald, professor at the Uni- 
versity of Géttingen, has recently thus charac- 
terized this event: “The history of the old 
Jewish people is fundamentally the history of 
the true religion, proceeding from step to step 
to its complete development, rising through all 
kinds of struggles, until it achieves a supreme 
victory, and finally manifesting itself in all its 
majesty and power, in order to spread irresisti- 
bly, by its proper virtue, so as to become the 
eternal possession and blessing of all nations.” * 

How is the great event thus characterized 


* H. Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel, bis Christus. Sec- 
ond edition, vol. i, p. 9. Gdéttingen, 1851, 


FIFTH MEDITATION, 171 


by M. Ewald proved? By what marks can 
we distinguish the Divine origin of this special 
revelation that became the Christian religion ? 
What does it affirm itself in support of its 
claim to the moral conquest of mankind ? 

At the very outset, in proving her dogmas 
and precepts to have come from God, the 
Christian revelation asserts that the documents 
in which it is written are themselves of divine 
origin. The divine inspiration of the sacred 
volume is the first basis of the Christian Faith, 
the external title of Christianity to authority 
over souls. What is the full import of this 
title? What the signification of the inspira- 


tion of the sacred volumes ? 


SIXTH MEDITATION. 


THE INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES. 


I nave read the sacred volumes over and 
over again, I have perused them in very dif- 
ferent dispositions of mind, at one time study- 
ing them as great historical documents, at 
another admiring them as sublime works of 
poetry. I have experienced an extraordinary 
impression, quite different from either curiosity 
or admiration. I have felt myself the listener 
of a language other than that of the chronicler 
or the poet, and under the influence of a 
breath issuing from other sources than human. 
Not that man does not occupy a great place 
in the sacred volumes; he displays himself 
there, on the contrary, with all his passions, his 


vices, his weaknesses, his ignorance, his errors ; 


SIXTH MEDITATION, 178 


the Hebrew people shows itself rude, barbar- 
ous, changeable, superstitious, accessible to all] 
the imperfections, to all the failings of other 
nations. But the Hebrew is not the sole actor 
in his history; he has an Ally, a Protector, a 
Master, who intervenes incessantly to command, 
inspire, direct, strike, or save. God is there, 


always present, acting — 


“Et ce n’est pas un Dieu comme vos dieux frivoles, 
Insensibles et sourds, impuissants, mutilés, 
De bois, de marbre, ou d’or, comme vous le voulez,” * 


“Not such a god as are your friv’lous gods, 
Insensible and deaf, weak, mutilated, 
Of wood, or stone, or gold, as you will have them,” 

It is the God One and Supreme, All Power- 
ful, the Creator, the Eternal. And even in 
their forgetfulness and their disobedience, the 
Hebrews believe still in God: he is still the 
object at once of their fear, of their hope, and 
of a faith that persists in the midst of the infi- 
delity of their lives. The Bible is no poem in 


which man recounts and sings the adventures 


* Corneille, Polyeucte, acte iv, sc. 3. 


174 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


of his God combined with his own; it is a real 
drama, a continued dialogue between God and 
man personified in the Hebrews; it is, on one 
side, God’s will and God’s action, and on the 
other, man’s liberty and man’s faith, now in 
‘pious association, now at fatal variance. 

The more I have perused the Scriptures the 
more surprised I feel that earnest readers 
should not have been impressed as I have been, 
and that several should have failed to see the 
characteristic of divine inspiration, so foreign to 
every other book, so remarkable in this one. 
That men who absolutely deny all supernatural 
action of God in the world, should not be 
more disposed to admit it in the sources of the 
Bible than elsewhere, is perfectly comprehensi- 
ble; but the attack upon the divine inspiration 
of the sacred books has another motive, and 
one more likely to prove contagious. It is not 
without ,deep regret that I proceed in this 
place to contradict ancient traditions, at once 


respected and respectable, and perhaps to offend 


’ SIXTH MEDITATION. 175 


sober and sincere convictions, But my own 
conviction is stronger than my regret, and it is 
still more so because accompanied by another 
conviction, which is, that the system that it is my 
intention to contest, has occasioned, continues 
to occasion, and may still occasion, an immense 
ill to Christianity. 

Whoever reads without prejudice in the 
Hebrew and Greek the original texts of the 
Scriptures, whether of the Old or New Testa- 
ment, meets there often in the midst of their 
sublime beauties, I do not say merely faulty of 
style, but of grammar, in violation of those 
logical and natural rules of language common 
to all tongues. Are we to infer that these 
faults have the same origin as the doctrines 
with which they are intermixed, and that they 
are both divinely inspired ?* 

And yet this is what is pretended by fervent 

*T indicate, in a note placed at the end of this volume, some 
instances of these grammatical faults met with in the Scriptures, 


and to which it is impossible to assign the character of divine 
inspiration, 


176 THE CHRISTIAN ee | 

and ae men, who maintain that all, abso- 
lutely all, in the Scriptures is divinely inspired, 
the words as well as the ideas, all the words 
used upon all subjects, the material of lan- 
guage as well as the doctrine which lies at its 
base. 

In this assertion I see but deplorable con- 
fusion, leading to profound misapprehension 
both of the meaning and the object of the 
sacred books. It was not God’s purpose to 
give instruction to men in grammar, and if not 
in grammar, neither was it any more God’s pur- 
pose to give instruction in geology, astronomy, 
geography, or chronology. It is on their rela- 
tions with their Creator, upon duties of men 
toward him and toward each other, upon the 
rule of faith and of conduct in life, that God 
has lighted them by light from heaven. It is 
to the subject of religion and morals, and to 
these alone, that the inspiration of the Scrip- 
tures is directed. 


Among the principal arguments alleged to 


. SIXTH MEDITATION, 177 
prove that everything in the sacred volumes is 
divinely inspired, particular use has been made 
of the Second Epistle of St. Paul to Timothy, 
where in effect we find the passage : 

“All Scripture is given by inspiration of 
God, and is profitable for doctri ‘ine, for reproof, 
for correction, for instruction in righteousness : 

“That the man of God may be perfect, 
thoroughly furnished unto, all good works.” * 

Is it possible to determine jn words of 
greater precision the religious and moral object 
of the inspiration ? 

Appeal is made to a consideration of a dif. 
ferent description. If, if is said, we at the 
same time admit, on the one side, the inspira- 
tion of the sacred books, and on the other, that 
this inspiration is not universal and absolute, 
who shall make the selection between these 
two parts ? who mark the limit of the Inspira- 
tion ? who say which texts, which passages are 
inspired, and which are not? So to divide the 


*2 Timothy iii, 16, 17, 
12 


178 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


Holy Scriptures is to strip them of their super- 
natural character, to destroy their authenticity, 
by surrendering them to all the incertitudes, all 
the disputes of men: a complete and uninter- 
rupted inspiration alone is capable of command- 
ing faith. 

Never-dying pretension of man’s weakness! 
Created intelligent and free, he proposes to use 
largely his intelligence and his freedom; at the 
same time, conscious how feeble his means are, 
how inadequate to his aspirations, he invokes a 
guide, a support; and from the very moment 
that his hope fixes upon it, he will have it 
immutable, infallible.’ He searches a fixed point 
to which to attach himself with absolute and 
permanent assurance. In creating man, God 
did not leave him without fixed points; the 
divine revelation, and the inspiration of the 
Scriptures, had precisely for object and effect to 
supply these, but not on all subjects alike and 
without distinction. I refer here again to what 


I lately said respecting the separation of the 


SIXTH MEDITATION. 179 


finite and the infinite, of the world created, and 
of its Creator. At the same time that the 
limits of the finite world are those of human 
science, it is to human study and human science 
that God has surrendered the finite world ; it is 
not there that God has set up his divine torch } 
he has dictated to Moses the laws which regu- 
late the duties of man toward God, and of man 
toward man; but he has left to. Newton the 
discovery of the laws which preside over the 
universe. The Scriptures speak upon all sub- 
jects ; circumstances connected with the finjte 
world are there incessantly mixed with per: 
spectives of infinity ; but it is only to the latter, 
to that future of which they permit us to 
snatch a view, and to the laws which they 
impose upon men, that the divine inspiration 
addresses itself ; God only pours his light in 
quarters which man’s eye and man’s labor can- 
not reach; for all that remains, the sacred 
books speak the language used and understood 


by the generations to whom they are addressed. 


180 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


God does not, even when he inspires them, 
transport into future domains of science the 
interpreters he uses, or the nations to whom he 
sends them; he takes them both as he finds 
them, with their traditions, their notions, their 
degree of knowledge or ignorance as respects 
the finite world, of its phenomena and its laws. 
It is not the condition, the scientific progress of 
the human understanding; it is the condition 
and moral progress of the human soul which 
are the object of the divine action, and God 
requires not, for the exercise of his power on 
the human soul, science either as a precursor or 
a companion; he addresses himself to instincts 
and desires the most intimate and most sublime 
as well as the most universal in man’s nature, 
to instincts and desires of which science is 
neither the object nor the measure, and which 
require to be satisfied from other sources. 
Whatever true or false science we find in the 
Scriptures upon the subject of the finite world, 


proceeds from the writers themselves or their 


SIXTH MEDITATION. 181 


cotemporaries; they have spoken as they 
believed, or as those believed who surrounded 
them when they spoke: on the other hand, the 
light thrown over the infinite, the law laid 
down, and the perspective opened by that same 
light, these are what proceed from God, and 
which he has inspired in the Scriptures. Their 
object is essentially and exclusively moral and 
practical; they express the ideas, employ the 
images, and speak the language best calculated 
to produce a powerful effect upon the soul, to 
regenerate and to save it. I open the Gospel 
according to St. Luke, and I there read the 
admirable parable: 

“'There was a certain rich man, which was 
clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared 
sumptuously every day: 

“ And there was a certain beggar named Laz- 
arus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores, 

“And desiring to be fed with the crumbs 
which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover 


the dogs came and licked his sores. 


182 ' THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


“ And it came to pass, that the beggar died, 
and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s 
bosom: the rich man also died, and was 
buried ; 

“ And in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in 
torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and 
Lazarus in his bosom. 

“ And he cried and said, Father Abraham, 
have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he 
may dip the tip of his finger in water, and 
cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this 
flame. 

“But Abraham said, Son, remember that 
thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, 
and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he 
is comforted, and thou art tormented. 

“ And beside all this, between us and you 
there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which 
would pass from hence to you cannot; neither 
can they pass to us, that would come from 
thence. 

“Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, 


SIXTH MEDITATION. 1838 


that thou wouldest send him to my father’s 
house: 

“For I have five brethren; that he may 
testify unto them, lest they also come into this 
place of torment. 

“ Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses 
and the prophets; let them hear them. 

“And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but 
if one went unto them from the dead, they 
will repent. 

“And he said unto him, If they hear not 
Moses and the prophets, neither will they be 
persuaded, though one rose from the dead.” * 

Was it the intention of Jesus, and of the 
evangelist who has repeated his words, to 
describe, as they really are, the condition of 
men after their earthly existence, their positive 
local position after God’s judgment, and their 
relations either with each other or with the 
world which they have quitted? Certainly 


not; the material circumstances intermixed 


* Luke xvi, 19-31. 


Re 


+ 
184 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


with this dialogue are only images borrowed 
from actual common life. But what images so 
strike, so penetrate the soul? What more 
solemn warning addressed to men in this life, 
to rouse them to a sense of their duties toward 
God and their fellow-creatures in the name of 
the mysterious future that awaits them ? 
Nothing is further from my thought than 
to see in the sacred books mere poetical images 
and symbols; those books are really, with 
respect to the religious problems that beset 
man’s thoughts, the Light and the voice of 
God; still, that light only lights, that voice 
only reveals revelations of God with man, 
duties which God enjoins men in the course 
of their present life, and prospects which he 
opens to them beyond the imperfect and 
limited world where this life passes. As for 
this life itself, it is the object of human study 
and science, not of the inspiration of the sacred 
Scriptures. In disregarding this limit, in pre- 


tending to attribute to the language of the 


_ 
SIXTH MEDITATION. 185 


Scriptures, used with reference to the phe- 
nomena of the finite world, the character of 
divine inspiration, men have fallen with respect 
both to thought and act into deplorable errors. 
Hence proceeded the trial of Galileo, and 
numerous other controversies, numerous other 
condemnations still more absurd, still more to 
be regretted, in which Christianity was imme- 
diately placed in opposition to human science, 
and constrained to inflict or receive remark- 
able disavowals. The same is the case at 
the present day with respect to numerous 
objections made in the name of the natural 
sciences to Christianity, and which from ‘the 
learned circles where they have their birth, 
spread over a world at once curious and _ frivo- 
lous, where they cause the Christian faith itself 
to be regarded as ignorant credulity. Nothing 
of this kind could ever occur, no necessity of 
such a conflict could await the Christian re- 
ligion, if on the one side the limits of human 


science, and on the other those of divine in- 


ete a 


186 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


spiration, were recognized as they really are, 
and respected according to their rightful claims. 

I might cite in aid of the opinion I support 
numerous and great authorities. I will refer 
to but three, appealed to by Galileo himself 
in 1615 in his letters to the Grand Duchess 
Christina of Lorraine,* (who could appeal to 
authorities more august?) “Many things,” 
says St. Jéréme, “are recounted in the Scrip- 
tures according to the judgment of the times 
when they happened, and not according to the 
truth.”+ “The purpose of the Holy Scrip- 
tures,” says the Cardinal Baronius, “is to teach 
us how to go to heaven, and not how the 
heavens go.” “This.” says Kepler, “is the 
counsel I give to the man so ill-informed as 
not to understand the science of astronomy, or 
so weak as to regard adhesion to Copernicus — 


as proof of want of piety. Let him at once 


* Opere Complete di Galileo-Galilei, t. ii, chap. ii, pp. 26-64. 
Florence, 1843. 

t Ghuvres de St. Jéréme, Comment. in Jeremiam, ed. Vallars, 
t. ix, p. 1,040. 


SIXTH MEDITATION. 187 


leave the study of astronomy and the exam- 
ination of the opinions of philosophers ; instead 
of devoting himself to those arduous researches, 
let him remain at home, till his fields, and 
occupy himself with ‘his proper business; and 
thence, raising toward the admirable vault of 
heaven his eyes, which constitute for him his 
sole mode of vision, let him pour forth his 
heart in thanksgivings and praises to God his 
Creator. He may rest assured that he is thus 
rendering to God a worship as perfect as that 
of the astronomer himself, to whom God has 
accorded the gift of seeing clearer with the 
eyes of his intelligence; but who, above all 
the worlds and all the heavens that he attains, 
knows and wills to find his God.” * 

I discard, then, as absolutely foreign to the 
grand question that occupies me, all the diffi- 
culties suggested to the Scriptures in the name 
of those sciences whose province is finite nature. 
I seek and consider in these books only what 


* Kepler, Nova Astronomia, Introductio, p. 9. Prague, 1609. 


188 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


is their sole object—the relations of God with 
man, and the solution of those problems which 
these relations cause to weigh upon the human 
soul. The deeper we go in the study of the 
sacred volumes, restored to their real object, 
the more the divine inspiration becomes mani- 
fest and striking. God and man are there 
ever both present, both actors in the same 
history. Of this history it is my present object . 


to illustrate the grand features. 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 


GOD ACCORDING TO THE BIBLE. 


Ir is far from my intention to evade the 
questions which concern the authenticity of the 
Bible, and of the respective books which com- 
pose it. I shall enter upon them in the second 
series of these Meditations, when I touch upon 
the history of the Christian religion. Those 
questions, however, have no bearing upon the 
subject which occupies me at the present mo- 
ment; the Bible, whatever its antiquity, what- 
ever the comparative antiquity of its different 
parts, has been ever that witness of God in 
which the Hebrews believed, and under the 
law of which they lived, the great monument 
of the religion in the bosom of which the 
Christian religion took its birth. It is this 


190 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


God of whom in the Bible, and in the Bible 
alone, it is my purpose to seek the peculiar and 
true character. 

The nations of Semitic origin have been hon- 
ored for their primitive and persistent faith in 
the unity of God. Under different forms, and 
amid events very dissimilar, nearly all nations 
have been polytheistic; the Semitic nations 
alone have believed firmly in the one God. 
This great moral fact has been attributed to 
different and to complex causes; but the fact 
itself is generally acknowledged and admitted. 

In two respects in this assertion there 1s ex- 
aggeration. On one side, among the nations of 
Semitic origin, several were polytheistic; the 
descendants of Abraham, the Hebrews, and the 
Arab Ishmaelites, alone remained really mono- 
theistic; on the other side, the idea of the 
unity of God was not entirely strange even to 
the polytheistic nations. The greater part, like 
the Hindoos and the Greeks, admitted one sole 


and primordial Power anterior and superior to 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 191 


their gods ; idea, vague and searched from afar, 
derived from the instinct of man or the reflec- 
tion of the philosopher, and which among those 
nations became neither the basis of any religion 
that deserves the name, nor any efficacious 
obstacle to idolatry. The God of the Bible is 
no such sterile abstraction; he is the one God 
at the present time as in the origin of all 
things, the personal God, living, acting, and 

presiding efficiently over the destinies of the 
_ world that he has created. 

He has besides another characteristic, ene far 
more striking, which belongs to him more 
exclusively than that of Unity. The gods of 
the polytheistic nations have histories filled 
with events, vicissitudes, transformations, ad- 
ventures. The mythology of the Egyptians, of 
the Hindoos, of the Greeks, of the Scandina- 
vians, and numerous others, is but the poetical 
or symbolical recital of the varied and agitated 
lives of their gods. We detect in these recitals 


sometimes the personification of the fancies of 


192 THE CHRISTIAN es 

nations described in accordance with their 
actual phenomena, sometimes the reminiscences 
of human personages who have struck the im- 
agination of the people. But whatever their 
origin, whatever their name, each of those gods 
has his individual history more or less over- 
laden with incidents and acts, now heroic, now 
licentious, now elegantly fantastic, now grossly 
eccentric. All the polytheistic religions are 
collections of biographies, divine or legendary, 
allegorical or completely fabulous, in which the 
careers and the passions, the actions and the 
dreams of men reproduce themselves under the 
forms and names of deities. 

The God of the Bible has no biography, 
neither has he any _ personal adventures. 
Nothing occurs to him, and nothing changes 
in him; he is always and invariably the same, 
a Being real and personal, absolutely distinct 
from the finite world and from humanity, iden- 
tical and immutable in the bosom of the uni- 


versal diversity and movement. “I Am That 


a .- 


@ gi 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 193 


I Am,” is the sole definition that he vouchsafes 
of himself and the constant expression of what 
he is in all the course of the history of the 
Hebrews, to which he is present and over 
which he presides without ever receiving from 
it any reflex of influence. Such is the God of 
the Bible, in evident and permanent contrast 
with all the gods of polytheism, still more dis 
tinct and more solitary by his nature than by 
‘his Unity. 

. This is, indeed, so peculiarly the proper and 
essential character of the God of the Bible, that 
this character has passed into the very lan- 
guage of the Hebrews, and has become there 
the very name of God. Several words are 
employed in the Bible as appellations of God. 
One of these, 47, Hloah, in the plural Elohim, 
expresses force, creative power, and is applied 
to the manifold gods of Paganism as well as to 
the one God of the Hebrews. HI Shaddai. is 
translated by the all-powerful. Adonai. signi- 
fies Lord. The word Yahwe or Yehwe, which 


13 


“ 


x, f F wy 
194 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


becomes in Hebrew pronunciation Jehovah, 
means simply fe zs, and means self: existence, 
the Being Absolute and Eternal. This name 
occurs in no other of the Semitic languages, 
and it is at the epoch of Moses that it appears 
for the first time among the Hebrews: “ And 
God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am 
the Eternal,” ( Yahwe, Jehovah.) “ And I ap- 
peared unto Abraham, Isaac, and unto Jacob, 
by the name of the All-powerful, (47 Shaddai,) 
but by my name Eternal was I not known to 
them.”* Yahwe, Jehovah, is at once the true 
God, and the national God of Israel.+ 

The history of the Hebrews is neither less 
significant nor less expressive than their lan- 
guage; it is the history of the relations of the 
God, One and Immutable with the people 
chosen by him to be the special representative 


* Exodus vi, 2, 3. 

+ I have consulted, respecting the precise sense and the dif- 
ferent shades of meaning of the terms expressing God in Hebrew, 
my learned confrére at the Academy of Inscriptions, M. Munk, 
who has replied to all my inquiries with as much clearness as 
courtesy. 


d . , = * 
aie SEVENTH MEDITATION. 195 


of the religious principle, and the regenerating 
source of religious life in the human race. 
This people ‘undergoes the destiny and trials 
common to all nations; it demands, and_be- 
comes subject to, a variety of different govern- 
ments ; it falls into the errors and faults usual 
to nations; it frequently succumbs to the 
temptations of idolatry; like the others, it has 
its days of virtue and of vice, of prosperity and 
of reverses, of glory and of abasement. Amid 
all the vicissitudes and errors of the people of 
the Bible, the God of the Bible remains inva- 
riably the same, without any tincture of an- 
thropomorphism, without any alteration in the 
idea which the Hebrews conceive of his nature, 
either during their fidelity or disobedience to 
his Commandments. It is always the God who 
has said, “I Am That I Am,” of whom his 
people demand no other explanation of him- 
self, and who, ever present and sovereign, pur- 
sues the designs of his providence with men, 


who either use or abuse the liberty of action 


oo 
| ee 
of 


(196 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


which that God had accorded to them at their 
creation. , 

I wish to retrace, according to the Bible, 
the principal phases and the principal actors in 
this history. The more I study, the more I 
feel that I am watching, as M. Ewald has 
expressed it, “the career of the true religion, 
advancing step by step to its complete develop- 
ment;” that is to say, that I am there observing 
the action of God upon the first steps and 


upon the religious progress of the human race. 


I. GOD AND ABRAHAM. 


Tur history of the Hebrews, temporal and 
spiritual, opens with Abraham. At his first 
appearance in the Bible Abraham is a nomad 
chief, who has quitted Chaldea and the town 
of Haran, where his father, Terah, descended 
from Shem, is still living. He is wandering 


with his family, his servants, and his flocks, at 


SEVENTH. MEDITATION. 197 


first on the frontiers and afterward in the 
interior of the land of Canaan, halting wherever 
he finds water and pasturage, and conducting 
his tents and his tribe at one time through the 
mountainous districts, at another along the 
plains below. Why has he left Chaldea? 
According to the Bible itself, his father was’an 
idolater. “Your fathers,” said Joshua to the 
people of Israel, “dwelt on the other side of 
the flood” (the Euphrates) “in old time, even 
Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father 
of Nachor: and they served other gods.”* 
The book of Judith contains a similar asser- 
tion; + and the J ewish and Arabian traditions 
confirm, at the same time that they amplify, 
the statement: the father of Abraham, they 
say, was an idolatrous fanatic, and his son 
Abraham, having set himself against the 
practice of idolatry, was upon his charge 
thrown into a burning furnace, from which a 
miracle alone preserved him. The historian 


* Joshua xxiv, 2. tJudith v, 6-9. 


198 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


Josephus speaks of the insurrections which 
took place among the Chaldeans on the occa- 
sion of their religious dissensions. 

‘The Bible makes no allusion to these tradi- 
tions; from the very beginning God intervenes 
in the history of the father of the Hebrews. 
“The Eternal had said unto Abram, Get thee 
out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and 
from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will 
shew thee: I will make thee a great nation, 
and I will bless thee, and make thy name 
great; ... and in thee shall all families of 
the earth be blessed. . . . So Abram departed, 

. and Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot 
his brother’s son, and all their substance that 
they had gathered, and the sons that they had 
gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go 
into the land of Canaan; and into the land of 
Canaan they came.”* How had God spoken 
to Abraham? By a voice from without or by 
an internal inspiration? The writer of the 


* Genesis xii, 1-5. 


SEVENTIL MEDITATION. 199 


biblical narrative occupies himself in no respect 
with the question. God is for him, present 
and an actor in the history just as much as 
Abraham is; the intervention of God has in 
his eyes nothing but what is perfectly simple 
and natural: The same faith animates Abra- 
ham; he issues forth from Chaldea and 
wanders through Palestine, according to the 
word and under the direction of the Eternal. 
He wanders through the midst of popula- 
tions already established upon the land of 
Canaan, and with these he lives in peace, but 
still not uniting with them; bringing them 
succor when attacked by foreign chieftains ; 
fighting in their behalf as a faithful ally, 
sometimes, perhaps, in the character of a 
valiant condottiere, but remaining isolated in his 
capacity of nomad Patriarch, with his family 
and his tribe; repelling even the gifts and fa- 
vors which might perhaps lower his charac- 
ter or affect his independence. Everywhere 


that he halts, or that any incident of import- 


200 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


ance occurs to him, at Sichem, Bethel, Beer- 
sheba, Hebron, he raises an altar to his God. 
In his wandering uncertain life a famine im- 
pels him on one occasion even as far as Egypt: 
the first. perhaps of those shepherd chiefs who 
issued from Asia, and who were so soon to 
invade that rich country. Abraham passes 
in Egypt several years, well treated by the 
reigning Pharaoh; on excellent terms with the 
Egyptian priests, imparting to them and re- 
ceiving from them such knowledge of astron- 
omy or of natural philosophy as they mutu- 
ally possessed, but maintaining ever carefully 
the isolation of his family, of his tribe, and 
of his religion. Of his own. accord, or at 
the instance of the Pharaoh, he quits Egypt, 
carrying with him not only his flocks and 
his camels, but his Egyptian slaves, and among 
others Hagar. He returns to the country 
of Canaan, again wanders through several of 
its districts, takes part in different events — 


internal troubles or foreign wars, and finally 


oe Sei 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 201 


settles with his family and dependents at He- 
bron, near the oaks of Mamre, among the tribe 
of the children of Heth; but still always in his 
capacity as a foreigner, and always careful as 


such to preserve his character and his independ- 
ence. When his wife Sarah died, the book of 


Genesis tells us that, 

“Abraham stood up from before his dead, 
and spake unto the sons of Heth, saying, 

“Tam a stranger and a sojourner with you: 
give me a possession of a buryingplace with 
you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight, 

“And the children of Heth answered Abra- 
ham, saying*unto him, 

“Hear us, my lord: thou art a mighty prince 
among us: in the choice of our sepulchres bury 
thy dead; none of us shall withhold from thee 
his sepulchre, but that thou mayest bury thy 
dead. 3 

“And Abraham stood up, and bowed him- 
self to the people of the land, even to the 
children of Heth. — 


202 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


“And he communed with them, saying, If it 
be your mind that I should bury my dead out 
of my sight, hear me, and entreat for me to 
Ephron the son of Zohar, 

“That he may give me the cave of Machpe- 
lah, which he hath, which is in the end of his 
field ; for as much money as it is worth he shall 
give it me for a possession of a buryingplace 
among you. 

“ And Ephron dwelt,among the children of 
Heth: and Ephron the Hittite answered Abra- 
ham in the audience of the children of Heth, 
even of all that went in at the gate of this city, 
saying, 

“Nay, my lord, hear me: the field give I 
thee, and the cave that is therein, I give it thee ; 
in the presence of the sons of my people give I 
it thee: bury thy dead. 

“And Abraham bowed down himself before 
the people of the land. 

“ And he spake unto Ephron in the audience 
of the people of the land, saying, But if thou 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 203 


will give it, I pray thee, hear me: I will give 
thee money for the field; take it of me, and I 
will bury my dead there. ~ 

“And Ephron answered Abraham, saying 
unto him, 

“My lord, hearken unto me: the land is worth 
four hundred shekels of silver; what is that 
betwixt me and thee? bury therefore thy dead. 

“And Abraham hearkened unto Ephron; 
and Abraham weighed to Ephron the silver, 
which he had named in the audience of the sons 
of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, current 
money with the merchant. 

“And the field of Ephron, which was in 
Machpelah, which was before Mamre, the field, 
and the cave which was therein, and all the 
trees that were in the field, that were in all the 
borders round about, were made sure 

“Unto Abraham for a possession in the pres- 
ence of the children of Heth, before all that 
went in at the gate of his city. 

“And after this, Abraham buried Sarah his 


204 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


wife in the cave of the field of Machpelah be- 
fore Mamre: the same is Hebron in the land 
of Canaan. 

“ And the field, and the cave that is therein, 
were made sure unto Abraham for a possession 
of a buryingplace by the sons of Heth.” * 

Little importance does Abraham attach to 
his precarious condition as a wanderer and a 
stranger; he has faith in God. God commands, 
and Abraham obeys. God promises, and Abra- 
ham trusts. One day, however, with a feeling of 
anxious humility, Abraham makes the following 
prayer to God: “Lord Eternal, what wilt thou 
give me, seeing I go childless, and there is Eli- 
ezer of Damascus shall be my heir? And be- 
hold the word of the Lord came unto him, 
saying, This shall not be thine heir, but he that 
shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall 
be thine heir. Jam God, the mighty, all-power- 
ful; walk before my face, be thou perfect. I will 
establish my covenant between me and thee, and 


* Genesis xxiii, 3-20. 


SEVENTH MEDITATION, 205 


thy seed after thee, in their generation, for an 
everlasting possession, and I will be their God. 
But thou shalt keep my covenant ther@fore, thou 
and thy seed after thee, in their generations. 
And Abraham believed in the Lord; and the 
Eternal counted it to him for righteousness.” * 

In these days, in the bosom of Christian civ- 
ilization, obedience to God and confidence in 
God are the first precepts, the first virtues of 
Christianity. They were also the virtues of 
Abraham, and the precepts inculeated by 
Abraham’s history in the Bible. And the God 
of Abraham, the God of the Bible, is the same 
who is the object of adoration to the Christian 
of the present day; the same conception as 
that of those philosophers of the present day 
who believe in God, and believe in him as in 
- God Absolute and Perfect, Self-dependent, 
Eternal, without the possibility or attempt to 
define him otherwise. Thousands of years have 


changed nothing as to the biblical notion of 


* Genesis xv, 1-6, and xvii, 1-9. 


* 
~ 


206 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


* 


God in the human soul, nor as to the esseritial 
laws regulating the relation of man with God. 
Historigal tradition fully confirms the moral 
fact here mentioned. Abraham has not been 
the object of any mystical conception, or any 
mythological metamorphosis; nowhere has he 
been transformed into demigod or son of God; 
he has ever remained the model of religious 
faith and submission, the type of the pious man 
in intimate relation with God. Throughont all 
antiquity, and in all the Hast, as much for the 
primitive Christians as for the Jews and Arabs, 
as much for the Mussulmans as for the Jews 
and Christians, God is the God of Abraham ; 
Abraham is the friend of God, the father and 
the prince of believers; these are the very 
names that the Gospel gives him;* and the 
Koran, too, celebrates him in these words: 
“And when the night overshadowed him he 
saw a star, and he said, This is my Lord; but 


* St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans iv; Galatians iii; Epistle 
of St. James ii, 28. 


‘ a 
~ig ; 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 207 


when it set, he said, I like not gods which set. 
» And when he saw the moon rising, he said, 
This is my Lord; but when he saw it set, he 
said, Verily, if my Lord direct me not, I shall 
become one of the people who go astray. And 
when he saw the sun rising, he said, This is my 
Lord, this is the greatest; but when it set, he 
said, O my people, verily I am clear of that 
which ye associate with God. I direct my face 
unto him who hath created the heavens and 
the earth.” * 

The Eternal, the God One and Immutable, is 
the God of Abraham; Abraham is the servant 
and adorer of the true God. 


II. GOD AND MOSES. 
THE true idea of God, and the faith in his 
effectual and continued providence, are the two 
great religious principles which the name of 


Abraham suggests. This is the beginning of 


* Koran vi. 


208 THE a. % RELIGION. 

the history of the Hebrews, and the origin of 
that ancient Covenant which, in passing from 
the Pentateuch to the Gospel, has become the 
new Covenant, the Christian Religion. 

About five centuries later we find the He- 
brews settled in Egypt, in the land of Goshen, 
between the lower Nile, the Red Sea, and the 
Desert, in a condition very different from that 
in which they had first been when attracted to 
the court of Pharaoh by the prosperity of 
Joseph, the great-grandson of Abraham. The 
new Pharach oppresses them cruelly ; they are 
a prey to the miseries of slavery, the contagion 
of idolatry, to all the evils, all the perils, phys- 
ical and moral, which can afflict a nation nu- 
merically weak, fallen under the yoke of one 
powerful and civilized. The Hebrews never- 
theless persist in their religious faith, cling to 
their national reminiscences; they do not suffer 
their nationality to be lost in and confounded 
with that of their masters; they endure with- 


out offering any active resistance; they will 


ae 

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 209 

not deliver themselves, but they have never 

ceased to believe in their God, and they await 
their Deliverer. 

Moses has been saved from the waters of the 
Nile by Pharaoh’s own daughter. He has 
been brought up at Heliopolis, in the midst of 
the pomp of the court, and instructed in the 
sciences of the Egyptian priests. He has 
served the sovereign of Egypt; he has com- 
manded his troops and made war for him 
against the Ethiopians. He has received an 
Egyptian name, Osarsiph, or Tisithen. Every- 
thing seems to concur to make him an Egyp- 
tian. But he remains a faithful Israelite: true 
to the faith and to the fortunes of his brethren. 
Their oppression rouses his indignation; he 
avenges one of them by killing his oppressor. 
The victims of oppression, alarmed, disavow 
Moses, instead of supporting him. Moses flees 
from Egypt and takes refuge in the Desert, 
among a tribe of wandering Arabs, the Mid- 


ianites, sprung, like himself, from Abraham. 
14 


210 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


Their chief, the sheik of the tribe, Jethro, 
called also Hobab, receives him as a son, and 
gives him his daughter Zipporah in marriage. 
The proud Israelite, who has declined to 
remain an Egyptian, becomes an Arab, and 
leads, several years, the nomadic life of the 
hospitable tribe. It is now in the peninsula of 
Sinai that Moses wanders with the servants 
and flocks of his father-in-law. In the center 
of that peninsula, of yore a province in the 
empire of the Pharaohs, but which had fallen 
into the possession of the pastoral Arabs, rises 
Sinai, a mount with which from time imme- 
morial, among the neighboring tribes, have 
been connected as many sacred traditions as 
have ever been assigned to Mount Ararat in 
Armenia, or the Himalayas in India. In this 
venerable spot, before a burning bush, Moses, 
with a heart full of faith, hears God calling 
him and commanding him to lead his people, 
the children of Israel, out of Egypt. Moses is 
humble, distrustful of himself, just as Abraham 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 211 


before him had been. “Who am I, that I 
should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should 
bring forth the children of Israel out of 
Egypt? .. . When I come unto the children 
of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of 
your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they 
shall say to me, What is his name? What 
shall I say unto them? And God said unto 
Moses, I Am Tuar I Am: and he said, Thus 
shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Au 
hath sent me unto you.” * 

Moses receives his mission from J ehovah, and 
feels no other disquietude than arises from the 
desire to accomplish it, 

In the presence of such facts, with this associa- 
tion of God and man in the same work, the oppo- 
nents of the supernatural still clamor, “ Why,” 
ask they, “this confusion of divine action and 
of human action? Has God need of man’s 
concurrence? Can he not, if he will, accomplish 
all his designs by himself, and through the full- 


* Exodus iii, 11, 18, 14. 


212 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


ness of his omnipotence ?” In my turn, I would 
ask them if they know why God created man, 
and if God has put them into the secret of his 
intentions toward the instrument whom he em- 
ploys for his designs? There precisely lies the 
privilege of humanity; man is God’s associate, 
subject to him, yet a free agent independent of 
him; he intervenes by his proper action in plans 


of which only an infinitely small part is re- 


= 


vealed to his intelligence and reserved for his » 


execution. Western Asia and its history are 
full of the name of Moses. Jews, Christians, 
and Mohammedans style him the First Prophet, 
the Great Lawgiver, the Great Theologian ; 
everywhere, in the scene of the events them- 
selves, the places retain a memory of him. 
The traveler meets there the Well of Moses, 
the Ravine of Moses, the Mountain of Moses, 
the Valley of Moses. In other countries and 
other ages this name has been given as the 
most glorious that the saints could receive. St. 
Peter has been styled the Moses of the Christian 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 218 


Church; St. Benedict, the Moses of the Monas- 
tic Orders; Ulphilas, the Moses of the Goths. 
What did Moses do to obtain a renown so great 
and so enduring? He gained no battles; he 
conquered no territory ; he founded no cities; 
he governed no state; he was not even a man 
in whom eloquence replaced other sources of 
influence and power: “And Moses said unto 
the Lord, O my Lord, I am not eloquent, nei- 
ther heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto 
thy servant; but I am slow of speech, and of a 
slow tongue.” * 

There is not in this whole history a single 
grand human action, a single grand event, pro- 
ceeding from human agency; all, all is the work 
of God; and Moses is nothing on any occasion 
but the interpreter and instrument of God. To 
this mission he has consecrated soul and life; it 
is only by virtue of this title that he is power- 
ful, and that he shares, as far as his capacity as 
4 man permits, a work infinitely grander and 


* Exodus iv, 10. 


wr” O14 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


more enduring than that accomplished by all 
the heroes and all the masters that the 
world ever acknowledged. 

I know no more striking spectacle than that 
of the unshakable faith and inexhaustible en- 
ergy of Moses in the pursuit of a work not his 
own, in which he executes what he has not con- 
ceived, in which he obeys rather than com- 
mands. Obstacles and disappointments meet 
him at each turn; he has to struggle with weak- 
nesses, infidelity, caprices, jealousies, and sedi- 
tions, and these not merely in his own nation, but 
in his own family. He has himself his moments 
of sadness, of disquietude: “ And Moses cried 
unto the Lord, saying, What shall I do unto 
this people ? they be almost ready to stone 


me.* 


I beseech thee, shew me thy 
glory.” And God answers him, “I will 
make all my goodness pass before thee... . 
Thou canst not see my face; for there shall 
no man see me and live.” And Moses trusts 


* Exodus xvii, 4; xxxiii, 18-20. 


SEVENTH MEDITATION, 215. 


in God, and continues to triumph while he 
obeys him. 

The work of deliverance is consummated ; 
Moses has led the people of Israel out of Egypt, 
has surmounted the first perus and the first suf- 
ferings of the desert. They advance through 
the group of mountains in the peninsula of 
Sinai. Passing from valley to valley, they 
arrive “at the entrance of a large basin sur- 
rounded by lofty peaks. Of these the one 
which commands the most extensive view is 
covered with enormous blocks, as if the 
mountain had been overthrown by an earth- 
quake. A deep cleft divides the peak into 
two. | 

“No one who has approachéd the Ras Suf- 
safeh through that noble plain, or who has 
looked down upon the plain from that majestic 
height, will willingly part with the belief that 
these are the two essential features of the view 
of the Israelitish camp. That such a plain 


should exist at all in front of such a cliff is so 


eee 


im 216 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


remarkable a coincidence with the sacred nar- 
rative, as to furnish a strong internal argument, 
not merely of its identity with the scene, but 
of the scene itself having been described by 
an eye-witness. The awful and lengthened 
approach, as to some natural sanctuary, would 
have been the fittest preparation for the coming 
scene. The low line of alluvial mounds at the 
foot gt the cliff exactly answers to the ‘bounds’ 
which were to keep the people off from ‘ touch- 
ing the mount.* The plain itself is not broken 
and uneven, and narrowly shut in, like almost 
all others in the range, but presenting a long 
retiring sweep, against which the people could 
‘remove and stand afar off’ The cliff, rising 
like a huge altar in front of the whole congre- 
gation, and visible against the sky in lonely 
grandeur from end to end of the whole plain, is 
the very image of the ‘mount that might not 
be touched,’ and from which ‘the voice’ of God 
might be heard far and wide over the stillness 


* Exodus xix, 12. 


SEVENTH MEDITATION, og fe 


of the plain below, widened at that point to its 
utmost extent by the confluence of all the con- 
tiguous valleys. Here, beyond all other parts 
of the peninsula, is the adytum, withdrawn, as 
if ‘in the end of the world, from all the stir 
and confusion of earthly things.”* Such was 
three thousand five hundred years ago, and 
such is still the place where Moses received 
from God and gave to the people of Israel that 
law of the Ten Commandments which resound 
still through all the Christian Churches as the 
first foundation of their faith and the first 
moral rule of Christian nations. 

The Hebrews, at the moment when the Dec- 
alogue became their fundamental law, were in a 
crisis of social transformation; they were upon 
the point of passing from the pastoral nomadic 
condition to that of farmers and settlers. It 
seems that, at such an epoch, the political insti- 
tutions of a people would, as the basis of their 


* Sinai and Palestine in connection with their History. By 
Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster, pp. 42, 48. London, 1862. 


918 i THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


government, be its most natural and most urg- 
ent business. The Decalogue leaves the sub- 
ject entirely untouched; makes to it not the 
remotest, the most indirect allusion. It is a 
law exclusively religious and moral, which only 
busies itself about the duties of man to God and 
to his fellow-creatures, and admits, by its very 
silence, all the varying forms of government 
that the external or internal state of society 
may seem to require. Characteristic, grand, 
and original, not to be met with in the prim- 
itive laws of any other nascent state, and an 
admirable and remarkable manifestation of the 
divine origin of this one! It is to man’s natu- 
ral and his moral destiny that the Decalogue 
addresses itself; it is to guide man’s soul 
and his inmost will that it lays down rules ; 
whereas it surrenders his external, his civil 
condition to all the varying chances of place 
and of time. 

Another characteristic of this Jaw is not less 


original or less urgent. It places God, and 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 219 


man’s duties toward God, at the head and front 
of man’s life and man’s duties; it unites inti- 
mately religion and morality, and regards them 
as inseparable. If philosophers, in studying, 
discriminate between them; if they seek in 
human nature the special principle or principles 
of morality ; if they consider the latter by it- 
self and apart from religion, it is the right of 
science to do so. But still the result is but a 
scientific work, only a partial dissection of 
man’s soul, addressed to only one part of its 
faculties, and holding no account of the 
entirety and the reality of the soul’s life. 
The human body, taken as one whole, is by na- 
ture at once moral and religious; the moral 
Jaw that he finds in himself needs an author 
and a judge; and God is to him the sdurce and 
guarantee, the Alpha and Omega of morality. 
A metaphysician may, from time to time, 
affirm the moral law, and yet forget its Divine 
Author. A man may, now and then, admit, 


may respect the principles of morality, and yet 


Way 


220 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


remain estranged from religion ; all this 1s pos- 
sible, for all this we see. So small a portion of 
truth sometimes satisfies the human mind! 
Man is so ready and so prone to misconceive 
and to mutilate himself! His ideas are by 
nature so incomplete and inconsequent, so 
easily dimmed or perverted by his passions or 
the action of his free will! These are but the 
exceptional conditions of the human mind, mere 
scientific abstractions ; if men admit them, their 
influence is neither general nor durable. In 
the natural and actual life of the human race, 
morality and religion are necessarily united ; 
and it is one of the divine characteristics of the 
Decalogue, as it is also one of the causes of that 
authority which has remained to it after the 
lapse of so many centuries, that it has pro- 
claimed and taken as its foundation their inti- 
mate union. 

This is not the place to consider the laws of 
Moses in civil and penal matters, nor to refer to 


his ordinances respecting the worship, or to 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 291 


those that regard the organization of the priest- 
hood of the Hebrews. In the former of these 
two branches of the Mosaic code, numerous 
dispositions, singularly moral, equitable, and 
humane, are found in connection with cireum- 
stances indicating a state of manners gross and 
cruel even to barbarism. | 

The legislator is evidently under the empire 
of ideas and sentiments infinitely superior to 
those of the people, to whom, nevertheless, his 
strong sympathies attach him. When we con 
sider the Mosaic legislation, we find that in 
everything which concerns the external forms 
and practices of worship, the ideas of Egypt 
have made great impression upon the mind of 
the Lawgiver, and the frequent use that he has 
made of Egyptian customs and ceremonies is not 
less visible. But far above these institutions 
and these traditions, which seem not seldom 
out of place and incoherent, soars and predomi- 
nates constantly the idea of the God of Abra- 


ham and of Jacob, of the God one and eternal, 


229 THE OHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


of the true God. The laws of Moses omit no 
occasion of inculeating the belief in that God, 
and of recalling him to the recollection of the 
Hebrews. And this, not as if they were re- 
calling a principle, an institution, a system; but 
as if they propose to place a sovereign, a lawful 
and living sovereign, in the presence of those 
whom he governs, and to whom they owe obe- 
dience and fidelity. 

Moses never speaks in his own name, or in 
the name of any human power, or of any por- 
tion of the Hebrew nation. God alone speaks 
and commands. God’s word and his commands 
Moses repeats to the people. At his first as- 
cending Mount Sinai, when he had received the 
first inspiration from the Eternal, “ Moses came 
and called for the elders of the people, and laid 
before their faces all these words which the 
Lord commanded him. And all the people 
answered together, and said, All that the Lord 
hath spoken we will do.” * 


* Exodus xix, 7, 8. 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 223 


When Moses, again ascending Mount Sinai, 
had received from God the Decalogue, he re- 
turned, “And he took the book of the covenant, 
and read in the audience of the people: and 
they said, All that the Lord hath said will we 
do, and be obedient.” * 

As the events develop themselves, the He- 
brews are found far from rendering a constant 
obedience: they forget, they infringe—and 
that frequently—these laws of God which 
they have accepted; and God sometimes pun- 
ishes, sometimes pardons them; still it is 
always God alone that is acting ; it is from him 
alone that all emanates; neither the priests who 
preside over the ceremonies of his worship, nor 
the elders of Israel whom he summons to pros- 
trate themselves from afar before him, nor 
Moses himself—his sole and constant  inter- 
preter—do anything by themselves, demand 
anything for themselves. The Pentateuch is 
the history and the picture of the personal 


* Exodus xxiv, 7. 


*, 


224 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


government by God of the Israelites. “ Our 
legislator,” says the historian Josephus, “ had 
in his thoughts not monarchies, nor oligarchies, 
nor democracies, nor any one of those political 
institutions: he commanded that our govern- 
ment should be (if it is permitted to make use 
of an expression somewhat exaggerated) what 
may be styled a theocracy.” * 

The eminent writers who have recently 
studied most profoundly the Mosaic system— 
M. Ewald in Germany,+ Mr. Milman and Mr. 
Arthur Stanley in England, M. Nicolas in 
France—have adopted the expression of Jose- 
phus, attaching to it its real and complete 
sense. “The term theocracy,” says Mr, Stan- 
ley, “has been often employed since the time 
of Moses, but in the sense of a sacerdotal gov- 
ernment: a sense the very contrary to that. in 
which its first author conceived it. The theoc- 
racy of Moses was not at all a government by 


* Josephus, contra Apionem, ii, c, 17. 
+Geschichte des Volkes Israel, bis Christus, ii, 188. Gdttin- 
gen, 1853. 


# 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 225 


priests, or opposed to kings ; it was the govern- 
ment by God himself, ag opposed to a govern- 
ment by priests or by kings,” * 

“Mosaism,” says M. Nicolas, “is a theocracy 
in the proper sense of the word. It would be 
a complete error to understand this word in 
the sense which usage has given to it in our 
language. There is no question here in effect 
of a government exercised by a sacerdotal caste 
in the name and under the inspiration, real or 
pretended, of God. In the Mosaic legislation 
the priests are not the ministers and instru- 
ments of the divine will; God reigns and gov- 
erns by himself. It is he who has given his 
laws to the Hebrews. Moses has been, it is 
true, the medium between the Eternal and the 
people, but the people has taken part in the 
grand spectacle of the Revelation of the Law ; 
of this the people, in the exercise of its free- 
dom, has evinced its acceptance; and in the 


covenant set on foot between the Eternal and 


* Lectures on the Jewish Church, p. 157. - 
15 


OG THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


the family of Jacob, Moses has been, if I may 
be allowed the expression, only the public offi- 
cer who has propounded the contract. He was 
himself, besides, not within the pale of the sac- 
erdotal caste; and the charge of keeping, 
amending, and seeing to the carrying out of the 
body of laws was not confided to the priests.” * 

Let the learned men who thus characterize 
the Mosaic theocracy pause here and measure ; 
the whole bearing of the fact which they com- 
prehend so well. It is a fact unique in the his- 
tory of the world. The idea of God is, among 
all nations, the source of religions; but in 
every case, except that of the Hebrews, scarcely 
has the source appeared before it deviates and 
becomes troubled ; men take the place of God ; 
God’s name is made to cover every kind of 
usurpation and falsehood ; sometimes sacerdotal 
’ corporations take possession of all government, 
civil and religious: sometimes secular power 
overrules and enslaves religious faith and relig- 


* Etudes Critiques sur la Bible—Ancien Testament, p. 172. 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 907 4s 


ious life. In the Mosaic dispensation we have 
nothing of the kind; its very origin and its 
fundamental principles condemn and prohibit 
even the attempt at any such deviations, No 
paramount priesthood here; no secular power 
playing the part of the oppressor. God is con- 
stantly present, and sole master, All passes 
between God and the people; all, I say, so 
passes through the agency of a single man 
whom God inspires, and in whom the people 
have faith, asking no other authority than that 
of the revelation which he receives, No sign 
here of a fact of human origin: just as the God 
of the Bible is the true God, the religion that 
descended, by Moses, from Sinai upon the elect 
people of God is the true religion destined to 
become, when Jesus Christ ascends Calvary, the 


religion of the human race. 


228 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


Ill. GOD AND THE KINGS. 


Moss having brought out of Egypt the peo- 
ple of Israel, and having conducted it through 
the Desert as far as the eastern bank of the 
Jordan, in sight of Canaan, the Promised Land, 
his mission terminates. “Get thee up,” says 
the Eternal to him; “ get thee up into the top 
of Pisgah, and lift up thine eyes westward, and 
northward, and southward, and eastward, and 
behold it with thine eyes: for thou shalt not 
go over this Jordan. But charge Joshua, and 
encourage him, and strengthen him: for he 
shall go over before this people, and he shall 
cause them to inherit the land which thou shalt 
see.” * 

Moses has been, in the name of Jehovah, the 
liberator and the legislator; Joshua is the con- 
queror, the rough warrior, of yet signal piety 
and modesty, the ardent servant of Jehovah, 


* Deut. iii, 27, 28. 


SEVENTH MEDITATION, 229 


the faithful disciple of Moses. After passing 
the Jordan, traversing the land of Canaan in 
_ every direction, and giving battle in succession 
to the greater part of the tribes that inhabit it, 
he destroys, or expels, or negotiates with them, 
and divides their lands among the twelve tribes 
of Israel. These exchange their wandering life 
for that settled agricultural life of which Moses 
has given them the law. The descendants of 
Abraham settle as masters in the soil in which 
Abraham had demanded as a favor the privi- 
lege of purchasing a tomb. 

_ The consequences of this new situation are 
not long in showing themselves. The conquest 
is protracted and difficult: the violence and 
rapine that characterize a state of war, one of 
dispossession and of extermination, replace among 
the Hebrews the adventures and the pious 
emotions of the Desert. In spite of their suc- 
cesses, the conquest nevertheless remains incom- 
plete : several of the Canaanitish tribes defend 


themselves efficaciously, and cling, side by side 


230 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


with the new comers, to their territory, their 
laws, their gods. The twelve tribes of Israel 
disperse and settle, each on its own account, 
upon different and distant points, some being 
even separated by the Jordan. The unity of 
the Hebrew nation, of its faith, of its law, of its 
government, and of its destiny, weakens rap 
idly; the tendency to idolatry, which the He- 
brews had so often evinced when wandering in 
the Desert, reappears and developes itself, 
fomented by the vicinity of the Polytheistic 
tribes of Canaan. Not, however, that we can 
precisely say that Polytheism prevails against 
the One God; but rather that material images 
of Jehovah become, in the midst of particular 
tribes, the object. of the idolatrous worship so 
strongly prohibited by the Decalogue. “ And 
the children of Israel did evil in the sight of 
the Lord, and forgat the Lord their God, and 
served Baalim and the groves.” 

Under such influences the moral and social 


* Judges iii, 7. 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. Oh 


state of the people of Israel undergoes pro- 
found changes; the barbarism, which had been 
formerly among them fanatical and _ austere, 
becomes unruly and licentious; their chiefs, 
their Judges, during the epoch which bears 
their name, no longer possess, sometimes no 
longer merit their confidence; even the heroic 
acts of some among them—of Gideon, of Debo- 
rah, of Samson—present rather a strange than 
an august character. The Mosaic Theocracy 
vails itself; the Hebrew nation becomes disor- 
ganized ; day by day the religious and political 
anarchy in Israel extends and becomes aggra- 
vated. 

But where the Divine Light has once shone, 
it is never completely extinguished ; and when 
the voice of God has once spoken, the sound is 
never entirely lost, even to ears that no longer 
listen. It has been affirmed that after Joshua, 
in the lapse of time that took place between 
the government of the Judges and the end of 


the reign of Solomon, the recollection of Moses, 


232 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


of his actions and his laws, had almost entirely 
disappeared—had lost all authority in Israel. 
Some passages from the biblical narrative will 
suffice to remove this error. I read in the 
Book of Judges, with respect to the Canaanit- 
ish tribes who resisted and survived in their 
countries the conquest and settlement of the 
Hebrew tribes: These nations “ were to prove 
Israel, to know whether they would hearken 
unto the commandments of the Lord, which he 
commanded their fathers by the hand of 
Moses.” * And again, in the Book of Samuel, 
it is the Eternal “that advanced Moses and 
Aaron... which brought forth your fathers 
out of the land of Egypt, and made them dwell 
in this place.” + And in the Book of Kings, t 
David, on the point of expiring, says to his son 
Solomon, “ Keep the charge of the Lord thy 
God, to walk in his ways, to keep his statutes, 
and his commandments, and his judgments, and 
his testimonies, as it is written in the law of 


* Judges iii, 4. + 1 Samuel xii, 6, 8. { 1 Kings ii, 3. 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 238 


Moses.” And when Solomon, after the solemn 
dedication of his Temple, had addressed to God 
his prayer of thanksgiving, “he stood, and 
blessed all the congregation of Israel with a 
loud voice, saying, Blessed be the Lord, that 
hath given rest unto his people Israel, accord- 
ing to all that he promised: there hath not 
failed one word of all his good promise, which 
he promised by the hand of Moses his serv- 
ant.” * | 

In the customs and lives of the Israelites 
these “good promises” had not practically, it 
is true, preserved all their efficacy: the worship 
of Jehovah and the legislation of Moses had 
fallen into sad oblivion, and undergone serious 
changes. But, in the national sentiment, Jeho- 
vah the Eternal was ever the One God, the 
True God, and Moses his interpreter. Moral 
and social disorder had invaded the Hebrew 
Confederation ; the Divine Law and Tradition 
were incessantly violated, still not ignored: 


* 1 Kings viii, 55, 56. 


\ 


234 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


they ever continued the Divine Law and Tra- 
dition, the objects of the faith and veneration 
of Israel. 

When the evil of anarchy had brought with 
it great national reverses—when the Philistines 
on the south, the Ammonites on the east, and 
the Mesopotamians on the north had placed in 
jeopardy the Hebrew settlement in Canaan—a 
general cry arose; on all sides the tribes de- 
manded a strong government, a single chief, 
one capable of maintaining order within, and 
supporting abroad the position and the honor 
of Israel. <A great and faithful servant of Je- 
hovah, the last of the judges, and the greatest 
of the prophets since Moses —Samuel— had 
recently governed Israel, and strenuously strug- 
gled to arrest the progress of popular vice and 
misfortune; but he had become old, and his 
sons whom he had made “judges over Israel 

. walked not in his ways, but turned aside 
after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted 


judgment. ‘Then all the elders of Israel gath- 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 235 


ered themselves together, and came to Samuel 
unto Ramah, and said unto him, Behold, thou 
art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: 
now make us a king to judge us like all the 
nations.” * | 

The demand had in it nothing singular ; 
even at the epoch when God, by his servant 
Moses, was personally governing Israel, the 
chance of the establishment of a human king- 
dom had been foreseen and provided for be- 
forehand by the Divine Law: “ When thou 
art come unto the land which the Lord thy 
God giveth thee, and shalt possess it, and 
shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I will set a 
king over me, like as all the nations that 
are about me; thou shalt in any wise set him 
king over thee, whom the Lord thy God 
shall choose: one from among thy brethren 
shalt thou set king over thee: thou mayest not 
set a stranger over thee, which is not thy 
brother.” + 


* 1 Samuel viii, 1-5. + Deut. xvii, 14, 15. 


936 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


Although thus provided for by the Divine 
Law, the demand of a king was extremely dis- 
pleasing to Samuel; “for the kingly rule was 
odious to him,” says the historian Josephus ; 
“he had an innate love of justice, and was 
ardently attached to the aristocratical form of 
government, as to the form of polity which 
rendered men happy and worthy of God.”* 
But the Eternal “said unto Samuel, Hearken 
unto the voice of the people in all that they 
say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, 
but they have rejected me, that I should not 
reign over them. ... Now therefore hearken 
unto their voice: howbeit yet protest solemnly 
unto them, and show them the manner of the 
king that shall reign over them.” + 

Samuel predicted to the Hebrews how much 
the kingly form of government would cost 
them, all that they would have to suffer in their 
families, their property, and their liberties: 


* Josephus, Ant. Jud., vol. vi, ch. iii, 8. 
t 1 Sam. viii, 7-9. 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 237 


“Nevertheless the people refused to obey the 
voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we 
will have a king over us; that we also may be 
like all the nations; and that our king may 
judge us, and go out before us, and fight our 
battles. And Samuel heard all the words of 
the people, and he rehearsed them in the ears 
of the Lord. And the Lord said to Samuel, 
Hearken unto their voice, and make them a 
king.” * 

The world’s history offers no example where 
the merits and defects of absolute tonarchy 
were so rapidly developed, where they were 
displayed so strikingly, as in this little Hebrew 
monarchy, instituted with a view of escaping 
from anarchy by the express desire of the peo- 
ple itself. . Three kings succeed to the throne, 
in origin, character, conduct, and reign abso- 
lutely dissimilar. Saul is a warrior, chosen by 
Samuel for his strength, bodily beauty, and 
courage; ever ready for the combat, but with- 


* 1 Samuel viii, 19-22. 


238 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


out foresight, without perseverance in his mili- 
tary operations; easily intoxicated with good 
fortune ; hurried away by brutal, capricious, or 
jealous passions; now engaged in furious strug- 
gles, now appearing in a dependent position, 
with his patron Samuel, his son Jonathan, his 
son-in-law David; a genuine barbarian king, 
arrogant, changeable of humor, impatient of 
control, prone to superstition, a moment serv- 
ing Israel against her enemies, but incapable of 
governing Israel in the name of its God. 
David, off the contrary, is the faithful and con- 
sistent representative of religious faith and 
religious life in Israel; the fervent and submiss- 
ive adorer of the Eternal; he is so at all the 
epochs and in the most varying aspects of his 
career, whether of humility or of grandeur; at 
once warrior, king, prophet, poet; as ardent. to 
celebrate his God in his character of poet, as to 
serve him in the capacity of warrior, or to obey 
him in that of king; equally sublime in his 
thanksgiving to the Eternal for his triumphs as 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 239 


in his invocation to him in his distresses; accessi- 
ble to the most culpable human weaknesses, but 
prompt to repent the offense once committed ; 
and giving always to impulses of joy or pious 
sadness the first place in his soul; very king of 
the nation that adores the very God. David 
accomplishes the work of his time: he obtains 
the object for which the monarchy had been 
demanded and instituted: he leaves behind 


him the tribes of Israel reunited at home, and 


reassured against foreign enemies, proceeding 


too in the path of good order and confidence. 
Heir to his father’s work, his father’s success, 
Solomon comes next, and reigns forty years— 
years of almost as much repose as splendor: 
“God gave Solomon wisdom and understand- 
ing exceeding much, and largeness of heart, 
even as the sand that is on the sea-shore.”* 
“And he had peace on all sides round about 
him. And Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every 


man under his vine and under his fig-tree, from 


* 1 Kings iv, 29. 


240 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


Dan even to Beersheba, all the days of Solo- 
mon.” * 

The kingdom and the kingly authority rose 
under the government of Solomon, and through- 
out all Western Asia, to a degree of power and 
splendor before unknown to the Hebrews. A 
prosperity out of all proportion with the posi- 
tion of a new king and a small state, and which 
reminds us of the rapid histories and the polit- 
ical comets of the East. Solomon at this point 
lost sight of both wisdom and virtue: the first 
hereditary prince of the Hebrew monarchy term- - 
inated his life like a voluptuous sovereign of 
Kcbatana or of Nineveh; the son of the pious 
King David became a skeptical moralist; al- 
though a profound observer of the nature and 
destiny of man, such observation had led but to 
feelings of disgust. Nor did the monarchy sur- 
vive the monarch: the nation became effemi- 
nate and corrupt, in the effeminacy and corrup- 
tion of its sovereign. Scarcely was Solomon 


* 1 Kings iv, 24, 25. 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 241 


dead, when his monarchy was divided into two 
kingdoms, which, at first rivals, became goon 
openly hostile to each other; sometimes a prey 
to tyranny, sometimes to anarchy, and almost 
always to war. It was not, as formerly, merely 
a bad phase of transition in the history of the 
Hebrew nation; it was the commencement of 
national decline—decline irremediable, hope- 
less. 
But what, in this decline, will become of the 
__ law revealed on Sinai to Moses? Is it destined 
Pe to fall with the monarchy of Solomon, or to 
languish and die out in the midst of the strug- 
gles and disasters of Judah and of Israel? 
Quite the contrary: the religious faith and law 
of the Hebrews will not only perpetuate them- 
selves, but will again shine forth at this epoch 
of political ruin. 
Above the fortune of states are the designs 
of God, to which instruments are never want- 
ing; the kings continue to perpetrate acts of 


violence, and the people to show marks of 
? 16 


ates 


~ 


249 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


weakness; but amid all, the prophets of Is- 
rael will maintain the ancient Covenant, and 
prepare the coming of that new Covenant 


which is to make of the God of Israel the God 


of mankind. 


IV. GOD AND THE PROPHETS. 


A CELEBRATED political writer—a freethinker 


belonging to the Radical school, somewhat also 


to the school of Positivism—Mr. John Stuart 


Mill, has recently said, in his work on Govern- 
ment, “The Egyptian hierarchy, the paternal 
despotism of China, were very fit instruments 
for carrying those nations up to the point of 
civilization which they attained. But, having 
reached that point, they were brought to a per- 
manent halt, for want of mental liberty and 
individuality ; requisites of improvement which 
the institutions that had carried them thus far, 
entirely incapacitated them from acquiring ; 


and, as the institutions did not break down 


*% 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 248 


and give place to others, further improvement 
stopped. In contrast with these nations, let us 
consider the example of an opposite character 
afforded by another and a comparatively insig- 
nificant Oriental people—the Jews, They, too, 
had an absolute monarchy and a hierarchy, and 
their organized institutions were as obviously 
of sacerdotal origin as those of the Hindoos. 
These did for them what was done for other 
Oriental races by their institutions—subdued 
them to industry and order, and gave them a 
national life. But neither their kings nor their 
priests ever obtained, as in those other coun- 
tries, the exclusive moulding of their character. 
Their religion, which enabled persons of genius 
and a high religious tone to be regarded and to 
regard themselves as inspired from heaven, 
gave existence to an inestimably precious un- 
organized institution—the Order Qf it may be 
so ,termed) of Prophets, Generally under the 
protection—it was not always effectual—of 


their sacred character, the prophets were a 


944 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


power in the nation, often more than a match 
for kings and priests, and kept up in that little 
corner of the earth the antagonism of influence, 
which is the only real security for continued 
progress. Religion consequently was not there 
what it has been in so many other places—a 
consecration of all that was once established, 
anda barrier against further improvement. 
The remark of a distinguished Hebrew, M. Sal- 
vador, that the prophets were, in Church and 
State, the equivalent to the modern liberty of 
the press, gives a just but not an adequate con- 
ception of the part fulfilled in national and uni- 
versal histories by this great element of Jewish 
life; by means of which, the canon of inspira- 
tion never being complete, the persons most 
eminent in genius and moral feeling could not 
only denounce and reprobate, with the direct 
authority of the Almighty, whatever appeared 
to them deserving of such treatment, but could 
give forth better and higher interpretations of 


the national religion. Conditions more favor- 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 945 


able to progress could not easily exist ; accord- 
ingly the Jews, instead of being stationary like 
other Asiatics, were, next to the Greeks, the 
most progressive people of antiquity, and, 
jointly with them, have been the starting-point 
and main propelling agency of modern cultiva- 
tion? * 

Mr. Mill is right, only he does not go far 
enough. Modern civilization is in effect de- 
rived from the Jews and from the Greeks. To 
the latter it is indebted for its human and intel- 
lectual, to the former for its divine and moral 
element. Of these two sources, we owe to the 
Jews, if not the more brilliant, at all events the 
more sublime and dearly acquired one. After 
the development of power and grandeur which 
took place among the Jews in the reigns of 
David and Solomon, their history is but a long 
series of misfortunes and reverses—an eventful, 
painful decline. The Hebrew state is divided 


* Considerations on Representative Government. By John 
Stuart Mill. Pp. 41-48. London. 


. * ; 

ty 
. 
ee 


9 4 6 ae 
Z THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. * 


into two kingdoms, almost constantly at war 
with each other. And while the kingdom of 
Israel is a prey to continual usurpations and 
revolutions, making it the scene of all the vio- 
lence and all the vicissitudes of a tyranny, the 
kingdom of Judah has a line of princes, in turn 
good or bad, who keep it unceasingly in a state 
of trouble and of jeopardy. Religion falls be- 
neath the yoke of secular government; idola- 
try appears in the kingdom of Israel, and 
braves audaciously the ancient national faith. 
The kingdom of Judah, however, remains more 
faithful to Jehovah and his law, to the tradi- 
tions of Moses, and to the race of David; but 
its languishing faith is no longer strong enough 
to arrest its march in the path of decline. In 
the two kingdoms, internal disorders are aggra- 
vated by reverses abroad; in the mean time, 
around them mighty empires spring up and 
succeed to each other. First Israel and then 
Judah are invaded by strangers; they are sub- 
jugated in turn by the Assyrians, the Egyptians, 


i ~ 
. MEDITATION, 247 


the Syrians, the Babylonians. The Hebrews 
are not only vanquished and reduced to sub- 
jection, but exiled, transported, led captive far 
from their country. A new conqueror, Cyrus, 
permits them to return to Jerusalem, but not 
to resume their independence; at first subjects 
of the Persian kings, they soon pass from their 
empire to that of the Greek generals, who have 
divided among one another the conquests of 
Alexander ; then to the rule of the Greeks suc- 
ceeds that of the Romans. During this succes- 
sion of servitudes, scarcely are they allowed 
any moments of existence as a free nation, and 
even this freedom is more apparent than real. 
Judea, like Greece, is subjugated, but under cir- 
cumstances of greater humiliation and distress. 
And shall, then, the Hebrews oppose no. efii- 
cacious resistance to the reverses? What is to 
become, in this absolute ruin of the nationality 
of the Jews, of their God and their faith ? 
Shall the miracles of Sinai have no more virtue 


than the mysteries of Eleusis, and Jehovah 


| > ~~ “a ; 
248 © THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 
languish away and vanish in the routine of sac- 
erdotal ceremonies, or in philosophical skepti- 
cism ? 

By no means: in the midst of his people’s 
decay, the God of Israel maintains interpreters 
who struggle with indomitable fidelity against 
public calamities and popular errors. The first 
of the prophets, Moses, had spoken in the name 
and according to the commandment of Jeho- 
vah. After him there never were wanting to 
Israel men who inherited or pretended to the . 
heritage of the same divine mission. “I will 
raise them up a prophet from among their 
brethren, like unto thee,” said the Eternal unto 
Moses, “and will put my words in his mouth; 
and he shall speak unto them all that I shall 
command him.... But the prophet, which 
shall presume to speak a word in my name, 
which I have not commanded him to speak, or 
that shall speak in the name of other gods, 
even that prophet shall die.” * 


* Deut. xviii, 18, 20. 


* - 
% . 
~ 


. * : 
SEVENTH MEDITATION. 949 


From Moses to Samuel, the series of the 
prophets is continued; some of them are of 
renown, like Nathan in the reigns of David and 
Solomon ; but the greater number without 
name in history, and appearing scattered over a 
long course of years. They are called the 
seers," the inspired.+ Their speech gushes 
forth like a well under the breath of God. 
When the government of the Judges gives 
place to that of the Kings, the great actor in 
this drama of transition, Samuel, opens for the 
prophets a new era; dedicated from his infancy 
to God’s service, he feels beforehand and abides 
the divine inspiration: “Speak, Lord ; for thy 
servant heareth.” { 

Not long after, his renown spreads among the 
people ; he is not pontiff, he is not even priest.§ 
But he is pre-eminently the seer: “Is not the 
seer here?” Such is the question addressed to 
some young maidens by the men who are in 


*Roéh or Chozeh, in Hebrew. +Nabi. {1 Sam. iii, 9, 10. 
§ Samuel propheta fuit, judex fuit, levita fuit, non pontifex, ne 
sacerdos quidem.—St. Jerom adv. Jovinianum. 


id 


250 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


search of Samuel. Saul meets him without 
knowing him, and says to him, “TI pray thee 
tell me where the house of the seer is.” “I am 
the seer,” replied Samuel; and soon after it is 
Samuel himself, who, in compliance with the 
popular vote, approved by God, proclaims Saul 
king. But at the moment when he thus 
changes the theocracy in Israel into a mon- 
archy, he foresees the vices and perils attendant 
upon the new government, and opposes to them 
the element of resistance drawn from their 
national beliefs and traditions; he transforms 
the order of prophets into a permanent institu- 
tion; he founds schools of prophets, independ- 
ent servants of Jehovah, consecrated to the de- 
fense of his law and the enunciation of his will; 
constituting a sort of congregation independent 
of both Church and State; leading, in fixed and 
appointed places—at Rama, Bethel, Jericho, 
Jerusalem—a life in common, but without 
exclusive privileges; the sons of the prophets 


are brought up near their fathers ; but still the 


SEVENTH MEDITATION, 251 


mission of prophecy is accessible to all who 
have the call from God: “Go, thou seer,” said 
the priest Amaziah, in his anger, to the prophet 
Amos, “ flee thee away into the land of Judah, 
and there eat bread, and prophesy there: but 
prophesy not again any more at Bethel: for it 
is the king’s chapel, and it is the king’s court. 
Then answered Amos, and said to Amaziah, I 
was no prophet, neither was I a prophet’s son; 
but I was a herdman, and a gatherer of syca- 
more fruit: and the Eternal took me as I fol- 
lowed the flock, and the Lord said unto me, 
Go, prophesy unto my people Israel.” * 

The prophets are neither priests nor monks. 
Sprung from all the classes of the Jewish na- 
tion, their vocation is essentially independent. 
They belong to God alone, and await divine 
inspiration to oppose, as it may happen, at one 
time the tyranny of the kings, at another the 
passions of the populace, at another the corrup- 
tion of the priesthood. Their only arms, the 

* Amos vii, 12-15. 


952 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


commands of God and the gift of prophecy. 
The functions assigned to them are as different 
as the places and circumstances of their life; 
but they are ready to take any part and to en- 
counter any peril. Some of them, like Elijah 
and Elisha, are men of action and of combat; 
the others, like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, 
are narrators, moralists, prophets; some devote 
themselves to attacks upon the acts of violence 
and impiety committed by the kings, the others 
to the vices and corruption of the people; the 
same spirit, however, animates them all; they 
are all interpreters and laborers of Jehovah ; 
they defend, all of them, the faith of God — 
against idolatry, justice and right against 
tyranny, the national independence against 
foreign dominion. In the name of the God of 
Abraham and of Jacob they labor and succeed 
in maintaining or in reanimating religious and 
moral life amid the decay and servitude of 
Israel. “ All the time,” says St. Augustine, . 
“from the epoch when the holy Samuel began 


¥ 
i 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 253 


to prophesy, to the day when the people of 
Israel was led captive into Babylonia, is the 
period of the prophets.” * 

To accomplish their mission, to insure their 
hard-earned successes, they had other arms 
than lamentations and exhortations arising out 
of what was past and inevitable; other expe- 
dients than pious reproaches and expressions of 
regret. These defenders of the ancient faith of 
Moses do not shut themselves up within the 
external forms and rites of their religion ; they 
pursue the moral object that it proposes; they 
insist upon the spirit that vivifies it. “Your 
new moons and your appointed feasts my soul 
hateth: (said the Lord, according to Isaiah,) 
“they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to 
bear them. And when ye spread forth your 
hands, I will hide mine eyes from you; yea, 
when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: 
your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make 
you clean; put away the evil of your doings 


* De Civitate Dei, 1, xvii, ch. 1. 


254 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn 
to do well; seek judgment, relieve the op- 
pressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the 
widow.” * , 

“ Wherewith shall I come before the Lord,” 
(said the prophet Micah,) “and bow myself 
before the high God? shall I come before him 
with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? 
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of 
rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? 
shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, 
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ? 
He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; 
and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to 
do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk 
humbly with thy God 2+ 

Even while calling the people of Israel back 
to the faith of their fathers, the prophets open 
to them new perspectives. While reproaching 
them with the errors that have led to their 
decay and servitude, they permit them yet to a 


* Isaiah i, 14-17. t Micah vi, 6-8. a 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 255 


see the future delivery and regeneration. It 
is their divine character to live at once in the 
past and in the future; to confide alike to the 
ordinances of the Eternal and to his promises. 
They move forward, but they change not; 
they believe, they hope; they are faithful to 


Moses while they announce the Messiah. 


- 


V. EXPECTATION OF THE MESSIAH. 


Controversy has the mischievous power of 
the Homeric Jupiter; it collects clouds amid 
which the light that we seek for disappears. 

The Old and the New Testament, the his- 
tory of the Jews, and the history of Jesus 
Christ, lie before us. Do these two monu- 
ments form but one single edifice? That 
second history, is it comprised and written be- 
forehand in the first? Such is the question 

es which has for the last eighteen centuries occu- 
: _ and divided the learned. Some affirm 


ry 


256 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


that Jesus Christ was foreseen and predicted 
among the Jews, and that the series of proph- 
ecies continued from the very time of Moses 
until the advent of Christ. Others* lay stress 
upon the hiatus, the want of connection and 
cohesion, the contradictions to be detected here 
between the Old and New Testament; and 
thence they conclude that the text of the Old 
Testament by no means contains the facts that 
appear in the New Testament, and that the 
miraculous history of Jesus Christ was, in the 
bosom of Israel, neither miraculously foreseen 
nor predicted. | m 

Why was it, and how was it possible, that 
two assertions so contradictory came to be both 
adopted and maintained by men most of them 
as sincere as learned ? 

They have all committed the fault of plung- 
ing into the petty details of facts and texts, 
searching in all places, without exception, for 
the complete demonstration of their particular 


theses, and losing sight of the great fact, the 


- q 
a 
“4 


*, 4 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 257 


general and dominant fact to which we should 
refer as alone capable of solving the question. 
They descend into the mazy paths which per- 
plex the plain below, instead of grasping from 
the summit of the mountains the whole com- 
prehensive view, and the grand road leading to 
the goal itself. Believers have insisted upon 
discovering, fact by fact, in the biblical prophe- 
cies the whole mission and all the life of Jesus. 
The incredulous, on the other hand, have mi- 
nutely adverted to all the discrepancies, all the 
difficulties, suggested by a comparison of the 
texts of the Old Testament and of the Gospel 
narrative ; they have contrasted the glories of 
the Messiah, the powerful King of Israel, so 
often announced by the prophets, with the 
humble life, the cruel death of Jesus, and with 
the ruin of Jerusalem. In my opinion, they 
have on both sides lost sight of the inward and 
essential characteristic of this sublime history ; 
the special action of God is revealed therein, 
but without suppressing the action of men; 
gf 17 


258 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


miracles take their place in the midst of the 
natural course of events; the ambitious aspira- 
tions of the Jews connect themselves with the 
religious perspective opened to them by the 
prophets; the divine and the human, the in- 
spiration from on high and the impulse of the 
national imagination, appear together. These 
two elements should be disentangled: the mind 
should be raised above the perplexing influ- 
ences which they exercise, and the attention 
directed to that heavenly beam which pierces 
the vapors of this earthly atmosphere. Thus, 
all the embarrassment that controversy , occa- 
sioned vanishing, the history yields to us its 
profound meanings, and, in spite of complica- 
tions having their origin in the wordy explana- 
tions of man, the design of God makes itself 
manifest in all its majestic simplicity. 
Discarding all discussion and commentary, 
let us merely collect, from epoch to epoch, the 
principal texts which speak of the advent of 
the future Messiah. I might here multiply 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 259 -- 


citations, but I limit myself to those where the 
allusion is evident. It is the Bible, and the 
Bible alone, that is speaking. 

The first act of disobedience to God, the act 
of original sin, has just been committed. The 
Eternal God says to the serpent that has 
seduced Eve: “Because thou hast done this, 
thou art cursed above all cattle, and above 
every beast of the field. ... And I will put 


enmity between thee and the woman, and 


between thy seed and her seed ; it shall bruise 


thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” * 

He that shall bruise the head of the serpent 
shall belong, says the Book of Genesis, to the 
race of Shem, to the posterity of Abraham and 
Jacob, to the kingdom of Judah. “ But thou, 
Beth-lehem Ephratah, though thou be little 
among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee 
shall he come forth unto me that is to be 
Ruler in Israel.” + 


* Genesis iii, 14, 15. 
t Genesis ix, 26; xii, 3; xlix, 10; Micah v, 2. 


7% 


260 . THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

Israel] is at its apogee of splendor: David 
prophesies alike the sufferings and the glory of 
that Saviour of the world who is to be not 
merely the King of Zion, but “the Son and 
the Anointed of the Eternal ;” “My God, my 
God, why hast thou forsaken me?” is the ex- 
pression attributed to him by the prophet 
king... . “All they that see me laugh me to 
scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the 
head. ... They gave me also gall for my 
meat, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar 
to drink. ... They part my garments among 
them, and cast lots upon my vesture.... He 
trusted on the Lord that he would deliver 
him; let him deliver him, seeing he delighted 
in him. ... Ye that fear the Lord, praise 
him; all ye the seed of Jacob, glorify him; and 
fear him, all ye the seed of Israel... . All the 
ends of the earth shall remember and turn 
unto the Lord: and all the kindreds of the 
nations shall worship before thee.”* The 


* Psalms fi, 2,'6;°7 5 ‘xxii, 1,:7; Ixix, 21; xxii 18,16, 28, 27. 


al 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 261 


kingdom of David and of Selomon has begun 
to decay; Judah and Israel are separating ; 
both kingdoms have their prophets, who at 
one time struggle against the crimes and evils 
of their respective ages, and, at another, oc- 
cupy themselves in disclosing prospects of the 
future. 

“ Hear ye now, O house of David. . . . 

“Therefore the Lord himself shall give you 
a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and 
bear a son, and shall call his name Imman- 
Henne a 

“The people that walked in darkness have 
seen a great light: they that dwell in the land 
of the shadow of death, upon them hath the 
light shined. . . . | 

“For unto us a child is born, unto us a gon 
is given: and the government shall be upon 
his shoulder: and his name shall be called 
Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The 
everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace... . 

“And there shall come forth a rod out of 


262 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


the stem of Jesse,-and a Branch shall grow out 
of his roots : 

“ And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon 
him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, 
the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of 
knowledge and of the fear of the Lord ; 

“| and he shall not judge after the sight 
of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of 
his ears : 

“But with righteousness shall he judge the 
poor, and reprove with equity, for the meek of 
the earth. ... 

“Tisten, O isles, unto me; and hearken, ye 
people, from far; The Lord hath called me 
from the womb; from the bowels of my | 
mother hath he made mention of my name.... 

“ And said unto me, Thou art my servant, O - 
Israel, in whom I will be glorified. 

“Then I said, I have labored in vain, I have 
spent my strength for nought, and in vain: yet 
surely my judgment is with the Lord, and my 
work with my God. 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 2638 


“ And now, saith the Lord that formed me 
from the womb to be his servant, to bring 
Jacob again to him, Though Israel be not 
gathered, yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of 
the Lord, and my God shall be my strength. 

“ And he said, It is a light thing that thou 
shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes 
of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of 
Israel: I will also give thee for a light to the 
Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation 
unto the end of the earth... . 

“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, 
OQ daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King 
cometh unto thee: he is just, and having*sal- 
vation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and 
upon a colt the foal of an ass. 

“... For he shall grow up before him as a 
tender plant, and as a root out of a dry 
ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and 
when we shall see him, there is no beauty that 
we should desire him. 


“ He is despised and rejected of men; a man 


264 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we 
hid as it were our faces from him; he was 
despised, and we esteemed him not. 

“Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried 
our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, 
smitten of God, and afflicted. 

“But he was wounded for our transgressions, 
he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastise- 
ment of our peace was upon him; and with his. 
stripes we are healed. 

“ All we like sheep have gone astray; we 
have turned every one to his own way; and 
the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us 
all.” 

“ He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet 
he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a 
lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before 
her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his 
- mouth. 

“He was taken from prison and from judg- 
ment: and who shall declare his generation ? 


for he was cut off out of the land of the living: 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 265 


for the transgression of my people was he 
stricken. ... 

“Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he 
hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make 
his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, 
he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of 
the Lord shall prosper in his hand. 

“ He shall see of the travail of his soul, and 
shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my 
righteous servant justify many; for he shall 
bear their iniquities. 

“Therefore will I divide him a portion with 
the great, and he shall divide the spoil with 
the strong; because he hath poured out his 
soul unto death: and he was numbered with 
the transgressors ; and he bare the sin of many 
and made intercession for the transgressors.” * 

Whatever controversies may arise out of. 
these texts, and many others which I might 
cite, one fact subsists and rises above all ques- 


* Tsaiah vii, 18, 14; ix, 2-6; xi, 1-4; xlix, 1-6; Zechariah 
ix, 9; Isaiah liii. 


266 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


tion and all controversy. Seventeen centuries 
passed in the interval between the Decalogue 
being received by Moses upon Mount .Sinai, 
and the actual approach of the Messiah an- 
nounced by the prophets; and at the end of 
these seventeen centuries, the God from whom 
Moses received the Decalogue, he who defined 
himself to be “I am that Iam.” Jehovah still 
is, has never ceased to be the God, the sole God 
of Israel. Israel has passed through all goy- 
ernments, undergone all vicissitudes, fallen into 
all the errors to which it is possible for a nation 
to succumb: the Jews have had a hierarchy, 
and judges, and kings; they have been altern- 
ately conquerors and conquered, masters and 
slaves; they have had their days of power and 
their days of humiliation, their temptation to 
idolatry and paroxysms of impiety; still they 
have ever returned to the One God: to the 
true God; their faith has survived all their 
faults and all their misfoftunes; and after those 


seventeen centuries, Israel is waiting at the 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 267 


hand of Jehovah a Messiah, to be, according to 
the affirmation of its greatest prophets, the Lib- 
erator and the Saviour, not of Israel alone, but 
of all nations. Fact without parallel in his- 
tory! In vain shall men exhaust against it all 
their science, and all their skepticism: there is 
here more than the work of man; the fact 
itself is not human. But what more shall that 
fact become, and what shall be our belief, when 
all shall have received its consummation—the 
prophecies their accomplishment—when Jeho- 
vah shall have given to the world Jesus 
Christ ? 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 


JESUS CHRIST ACCORDING TO THE GOSPEL. 


Nzxp I say that by the words “the Gospel,” 
here used, I understand the four Gospels, the 

Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, all the 
| hooks, in fact, which compose the Canon of the 
New Testament as it is received by. all Chris- 
tians ? 

These books have been variously studied: 
now with the design of disproving, now of 
explaining the life of Jesus Christ; now with 
the object. of a controversialist, now with that 
of a commentator. I approach the subject in 
neither character. I would wish to study 
Jesus Christ in the New Testament solely to 
know him well, and to make him well known; 
to place him before the reader, and to depict 
him faithfully according to the evidence of his 


‘ EIGHTH MEDITATION. 269 


history. I propose hereafter, in a second series 
of these Meditations, to examine its authentic- 
ity, and the degree of credit to which it is 
entitled. For the moment I assume the testi- 
mony as good and valid. Beyond all doubt, at 
the outset, it is at least entitled to this respect. 
The powerful influence of these books, and 
of the accounts which they contain, such as 
they remain to us, has been put to the test 
and proved. They have overcome paganism. 
They have conquered Greece, Rome, and bar- 
barous Europe. They are actually overcoming 
the world. And the sincerity of the authors is 
no less certain than the virtue of the books: 
however possible it may be to contest the en- 
lightenment, the critical sagacity of the original 
historians of Jesus Christ, their good faith is 
beyond all question: it appears in their lan- 
guage; they believed what they said; they 
sealed their assertions with their blood. “I 
believe,” said Pascal, “ only those histories, the 


witnesses to which confirm their attestation by 


270 THE CHRISTIAN RELI 


submitting to death.” Although not always a 
sufficient reason to believe an account, it con- 
stitutes a decisive motive to believe in the sin- 
cerity of the witness. 

have before cited from the Old Testament 
some of the texts which contain the promises 
made to Israel of the Messiah. These promises 
had evidently excited lively attention among 
the Jews; the satisfaction felt at their accom- 
plishment expressed itself loudly at the birth 
of Jesus Christ: “And behold, there was a 
man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon .. . 
waiting for the consolation of Israel; and the 
Holy Ghost was upon him. . . . Lord, now let- 
test thou thy servant depart in peace, according 
to thy word: For mine eyes have seen thy sal- 
vation, which thou hast prepared before the 
face of all people; a light to lighten the Gen- 
tiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.” * 

Besides Simeon, a pious woman, Anna, “of 
about fourscore and four years, which departed 


*Luke ii, 25-82. 


= 


ae - 


= MEDITATION, 271 
not from th temple, but served God with fast- 


ings and prayers night and day. And she com- 
ing in that instant gave thanks unto the Lord, 
and spake of him to all them that looked for 
redemption in Jerusalem.” * 

But there was far more than merely the 
demonstrations of Simeon and Anna, than these 
impulses of joy on the part of the faithful 
followers of Jehovah. “In those days came 
John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness 
of Judea.... And the same John had his 
raiment of camel’s hair, and a leathern girdle 
about his loins; and his meat was locusts and 
wild honey. ... And saying, Repent ye, for 
the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For this is 
he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, 
saying, The voice of one crying in the wilder- 
ness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make 
his paths straight. ...I indeed baptize you 
with water unto repentance. ... But there 
standeth one among you, whom ye know not. 


* Luke ii, 37, 38. 


272 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


He it is who, coming after me, is preferred 
before me, whose shoe’s latchet [ am not 
worthy to unloose. .. . And I knew him not: 
but that he should be made manifest to Israel, 
therefore am I come baptizing with water... . 
And I saw, and bare record that this is the 
Son of God.”* ¢ 

Attempts have sometimes been made, al- 
though with no very great confidence on the 
part of the propounders of the theory, to rep- 
resent Jesus as the most eminent among several 
reformers, who, about the same epoch, aspired 
to the title and character of the Messiah pre- 
dicted by the prophets and expected by Israel. 
Reference has been particularly made to one of 
his predecessors, Judas the Gaulonite, who, a 
few years after the birth of Jesus, on the occa- 
sion of a census ordered by the Imperial Le- 
‘ gate Quirinius, undertook to raise J udea in in- 
surrection against this measure, against the 
tribute that it imposed, and against the empe- 


* Matt. iii, 1-5; Mark i, 2-11; Luke iii, 1-18; John i, 26-34. 


a 


EIGHTH MEDITATION, 273 


ror himself, proclaiming that to God alone 
belonged the appellation Master, and that 
liberty was worth more than life,* 

These comparisons, I forbear to use the word 
assimilations, are entirely without foundation, 
These men, who, as it is pretended, anticipated 
the career of Jesus, were simply men who op- 
posed the Roman dominion, and who stood up, 
like the Maccabees before them, in the name 
of national independence, and in a spirit of re- 
action in favor of the Mosaic government. 
Jesus was not so anticipated. His mission had 
no relation with any previous essay; and his 
sole forerunner was John the Baptist, as strange 
as himself to any political view or conspiracy, 
and as humble before him, before the true, the 
sole Messiah, as Judas the Gaulonite and his 
adherents were bold and daring toward the 
emperor. 

There is an interval of thirty years between 

* Josephus, Antiq. Jud. 1, xvii, ch. 6; 1, xviii, ch. 1. Acts of 


the Apostles, ch. v, 34-89, 
18 


974 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


the birth of Jesus and the day when he enters 
actively on the performance of his divine 
mission.» These thirty years, however, were 
not idly passed, nor were they without their 
peculiar testimony to Christ and the future in 
store for him : 

“And Joseph and his mother marvelled at 
those things which were spoken of him... . 

“ And the child grew, and waxed strong in 
spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of 
God was upon him. 

“Now his parents went to Jerusalem every 


year at the feast of the Passover. 
“And when he was twelve years old, they 


went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the 


feast. 


* The question as to the precise epoch of the birth of Jesus 
Christ, as well as of the commencement and the duration of his 
public career, has been well and concisely considered in the 
Synopsis Evangelica of M. Constantin Tischendorf, (pp. 16-19. 
Leipzig, 1864.) The preferable conclusion from these researches 
is, that Jesus Christ was born in the year of Rome 750, that he 
commenced his divine mission toward the end of the year of 
Rome 780, and that his death took place in the fourth month of 
the year of Rome 783. 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 275 


“ And when they had fulfilled the days, as 
they returned, the child Jesus tarried behind 
in Jerusalem; and J oseph and his mother 
knew not of it. 

“But they, supposing him to have been in the 
company, went a day’s journey ; and they sought 
him among their kinsfolk and acquaintance, 

“ And when they found him not, they turned 
back again to J erusalem, seeking him. 

“And it came to pass, that after three days 
they found him in the temple, sitting in the 
midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and 
asking them questions. 

“And all that heard him were astonished at 
his understanding and answers, 

“And when they saw him, they were 
amazed: and his mother said unto him, Son, 
why hast thou thus dealt with ‘us? Behold, 
thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing, 

“ And he said unto them, How is it that ye 
sought me? wist ye not that I must be about 
my Father’s business ? 


276 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


“ And they understood not the saying which 
he spake unto them. 

“ And he went down with them, and came to 
Nazareth, and was subject unto them: but his 
mother kept all these sayings in her heart. 

“ And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, 
and in favour with God and man.” * 

Thus begins that manifestation in the person 
of the child Jesus Christ, that mixture of 
humanity and divinity, of natural life and mi- 
raculous life, which is his peculiar and sublime 
characteristic. In the opinion of the men who, 
in principle, reject the supernatural, this mixed 
divine-human nature, and consequently Jesus 
Christ himself, is at once incomprehensible and 
inadmissible. What wonder if Christ has in 
these days to encounter such adversaries? Had 
he not to do so when invested with the attri- 
butes of humanity, among cotemporaries, and 
even in his own family? In his first days of 


human existence, his mother, Mary, saw him 


* Luke ii, 38, 40-52. 


EIGHTH MEDITATION, O77 


and understood him not. And_ nevertheless 
“Mary kept all these sayings in her heart.” 
Expression at once profound and touching, 
revealing the mysterious complication of the 
nature of man! Man is not content to resign 
himself to the limits imposed by the actual 
laws of the finite world; his aspirations tend 
elsewhere. And still, when called upon to rise 
above the present order of nature, that order 
which he is able to appreciate, he experiences a 
certain astonishment, a certain hesitation; he 
does not know if he ought to believe in that 
supernatural that he was recently invoking, and 
that he never ceases to invoke ; for, like Mary, 
he preserves the instinct in his heart! It is 
just at the present day as it was nineteen cen- 
turies ago. Jesus has ever to encounter such 
contradictory moods of human nature. He is 
confronted at once by the hope of, the thirsting 
after the supernatural inherent in the human 
soul, and by all the objections, all the doubts 
that the supernatural itself suggests to the 


248 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


human mind. He has to satisfy that hope, to 
surmount those doubts. ‘The Gospel opens the 
history of this solemn struggle that gave rise to 
Christianity, and is the source of all those agita- 


tions which afflict Christians at the present day. 


I. JESUS CHRIST AND HIS APOSTLES. 


On entering upon the active purposes of his 
mission, it is the will of Jesus to have, and he 
has Disciples—Apostles. He knows the power 
of an association founded upon faith and love. 
- He knows also that faith and love are virtues 
as rare as they are efficacious. It is not num- 
bers that he seeks. He surrounds himself 
with a select band of believers, and lives 
with them in a complete and enduring in- 
timacy. 

In the midst of these intimate relations, Jesus 
declares his authority primitive and supreme: 


“Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 249 


you, and ordained you, that ye should go and 
bring forth fruit.” * 

But the authority of the Master does not 
prevent him from evincing a tenderness full of 
trust, and from respecting himself the dignity 
of his disciples: “Henceforth I call you not 
servants; for the servant knoweth not what 
his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; 
for all things that I have heard of my Father I 
have made known unto you.” + 

He evinces on all occasions toward his apos- 
tles the trust that He feels in them, and shows 
his sense of the superiority of the position to 
which He has elevated them. His language 
sometimes fills them with astonishment, and 
they are more peculiarly struck by the numer- 
ous parables in which, while addressing the 
assembled multitude, He clothes his precepts: 
“And the disciples came, and said unto him, 
Why speakest thou unto them in parables ? 
He answered and said unto them, Because it is 


* John xv, 16. t John xv, 15. 


280 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


given unto you to know the mysteries of the 


kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not 
given... . But unto those that are without, 
all these things are done in parables.” * 

The confidingness of Jesus, however, never 
descends to weak compliance ; when, in an im- 
pulse of vanity and ambition, one of his apos- 
tles asks for a particular favor, Jesus rebukes 
him with severity: “James and John, the sons 
of Zebedee, come unto him, saying, Master, we 
would that thou shouldest do for us whatso- 
ever we shall desire. And he said unto them, 
What would ye that I should do for you? 
They said unto him, Grant unto us that we may 
sit, one on thy right hand, and the other on 
thy left hand, in thy glory. But Jesus said 
unto them, Ye know not what ye ask: can ye 
drink of the cup that I drink of ? and be bap- 
tized with the baptism that I am _ baptized 
with? And they said unto him, We can. 
And Jesus said unto them, Ye shall in- 


* Matt. xiii, 10, 11; Mark ivy, 10, 11. 


* 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 281 


deed drink of the cup that I drink of: antl 
with the baptism that I am baptized withal 
shall ye be baptized: but to sit on my right 
hand and on my left hand is not mine to give; 
but it shall be given to them for whom it is 
prepared. ... Ye know that they which are 
accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise 
lordship over them; and their great ones exer- 
cise authority upon them. But so shall it not 
be among you: but whosoever will be great 
among you, shall be your minister.” * 

Jesus having thus selected and intimately 
attached to him his apostles, commissions them 
to carry forth his law: “Go not into the way of 
the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samari- 
tans enter ye not: but go rather to the lost 
sheep of the house of Israel. And as ye go, 
preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at 
hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise — 
the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have re- 
ceived, freely give. Provide neither gold, nor 


* Mark x, 85-43; Matt. xx, 20-26. 


289 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrips for 
your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, 
nor yet staves: for the workman is worthy of 
his meat. . . . Behold, I send ye forth as sheep 
in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as 
serpents and harmless as doves.” * 

It is, in effect, prudence side by side with 
absolute self-denegation that Jesus, in his first 
instructions, enjoins upon his disciples; at the 
very commencement of their mission he limits 
its object ; he recommends to them particularly 
“the lost sheep of the house of Israel ;” he de- 
clares his will to be that, instead of a pertinac- 
ity without bounds, “they should depart, 
shaking off the dust from their feet, out of the 
city that should not receive them nor hear 
their words.” But he adds immediately, as if 
to give to their mission all its grandeur: 
“What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in 
light: and what you hear in the ear, that 
preach ye upon the house-tops. And fear not 


* Matt. x, 5-10, 16; Luke x, 1-12. 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 283 


them which kill the body, but are not able to 
kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able 
to destroy both soul and body in hell.” * 

Jesus knows that his disciples will need the 
firmest courage, and, far from promising them 
any of the goods of this world, any temporal 
successes, he discloses to them unceasingly all 
the perils they will incur, all the invectives 
they will have to endure. “But beware of 
men: for they will deliver you up to the coun- 
cils, and they will scourge you in their syna- 
gogues; and ye shall be brought before 
governors and kings for my sake, for a testi- 
mony against them and the Gentiles... . And 
ye shall be betrayed both by parents, and 
brethren, and kinsfolks and friends; and some 
of you shall they cause to be put to death. 
And ye shall be hated of all men for my 
name’s sake.” + 
- What Reformer, other than Jesus Christ, 
ever held to his followers such language? 


* Matt. x, 27,28. + Matt. x, 17-22; Luke xxi, 12-17. 


284 THE OHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


Who else than God could have imparted to 
their language such virtue that they would in 
obedience to it sacrifice with joy not merely all 
the good things of this life, but life itself? 
Nevertheless, one of those apostles, and the 
first of them all, Peter, evinces some dis- 
quietude, if not at their lot in this world, at 
least at their destinies in the kingdom of heay- 
en. “Then answered Peter and said unto him, 
Behold, we have forsaken all, and followed 
thee; what shall we have therefore? And 
Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, 
That ye which have followed me, in the regen- 
eration when the Son of man shall sit in the 
throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon 
twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of 
Israel. And every one that hath forsaken 
houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or 
mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my 
name’s sake, shall receive a hundredfold, and 
shall inherit everlasting life.” * 


* Matt. xix, 27-29. 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 285 


But Jesus does not intend that the prospect 
of their lofty inheritance should inspire in the 
minds of any of his apostles, and not more in 
that of Peter than the rest, any proud presump- 
tuousness, and he immediately adds, “But 
many that are first, shall be last; and the last 
shall be first.”* The world’s history may be 
perused and reperused ; the causes of all the 
revolutions that have taken place in the world, 
whether religious or political, may be probed 
and investigated; but we shall nowhere be 
able to trace in the dealings of chiefs and ac- 
complices, of originators and fellow-workmen, 
the divine characteristics of absolute and un- 
compromising sincerity that reign throughout 
the actions and language of Jesus Christ in his 
conduct toward his apostles. Them he has 
chosen and loved; to them he has intrusted 
his work; but he practices with them no arts 
of worldly wisdom ; he withholds nothing from 


them; here is no faltering encouragement, no 


* Matt. xix, 30. 


286 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


exaggeration in the promises that he makes or 
in the hope that he holds forth; he speaks to 
them the language of pure truth, and it is in 
the name of that truth that he gives them his 
commands and transfers to them his mission. 
“Never did man speak like this man,”* nor so 


deal with men. 


I. JESUS CHRIST AND HIS PRECEPTS. 


Jxsus speaks: and it is at one time with his 
disciples alone, at another surrounded by eager, 
astonished multitudes; now from the mount, 
now on the shore of the sea of Gennesareth, 
from a bark; by the roadside; in the house of 
the Pharisee, Simon, and the toll-gatherer, Levi; 
in the synagogue of Nazareth, in the Temple of 
Jerusalem: Jesus speaks, “not like the scribes,” 
not like the philosophers; he expounds no sys- 
tem; he discusses no question; he does not 
pace up and down like Socrates with his 


* John vii, 46. 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 987 


learned friends in the gardens of the Academy, 
nor lose himself in the mazes of the human 
understanding. Jesus speaks to men, to all 
men without distinction; he speaks to them of 
man’s life, man’s soul, man’s destiny, of matters 
that touch all alike. And he speaks to them 
“as one having authority.” 

What does he say to them? What teach, 
what command, in that speech full of au- 
thority ? 


He teaches them, he enjoins them, to have 


. 


faith, hope, charity: those virtues which have 
now borne his name nineteen centuries, those 
virtues which are essentially Christian. 

Is it, then, in his own name that Jesus 
Christ teaches and commands? By no means: 
“My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent 
me. If any man will do his will, he shall 
know of the doctrine, whether it,be of God, or 
whether I speak of myself. 

“He that speaketh of himself seeketh his 
own glory: but he that seeketh his glory that 


288 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteous- 
ness is in him. ... Then cried Jesus in the 
Temple as he taught, saying, Ye both know 
me, and ye know whence I am: I am not come 
of myself, but he that sent me is true, whom ye 
know not. 

“But I know him: for Iam from him, and 
he hath sent me.” * 

While he refers everything to God, Jesus 
Christ seeks not to define or explain him; he 
affirms him and demonstrates him; God is the 
first cause, the point from which all things 
spring; faith in God is the paramount source 
of virtue, and of power, as well as virtue, of 
hope and of resignation. 

For Jesus Christ has not only a perfect faith 
in God, he has also a profound knowledge of’ 
man: he knows that, unaided, man’s soul can- 
not, without despair, without withering, bear — 
the burden imposed by the injustice of the 
world and of life, of the miseries and erroneous 


* John vii, 16-18, 28, 29. 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 289 


appreciation of mankind. To this injustice and 
this wretchedness Jesus Christ never ceases to 
oppose God, God’s justice, God’s benevolence, 
God’s succor: he recommends to him all the 
forsaken, all the oppressed, all the wretched, 
all the victims of society. He enjoins to these 
not resignation alone, but Hope as the sister 
and companion of Faith. Nor does he hold 
forth to those that suffer the realization of 
earthly expectations, the restoration of worldly 
prosperity, as their resource and their consola- 
tion. He has nothing to do with remedies 
deceitful like these. He acts with the most 
perfect truthfulness and sincerity toward man- 
kind in general, as he also does with his dis- 
ciples: he only promises them the re-establish- 
ment of justice, and the reward of virtue, in 
that mysterious future where God alone reigns, 
and of which he discloses to them the perspect- 
ive without unfolding the secrets. 

Nothing strikes me more in the Gospel than 


this double character of austerity and of love, 
i 19 


290 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


of severe purity and tender sympathy, which 
constantly appears, which reigns in the actions 
and the words of Jesus Christ in everything 
that touches the relation of God and mankind. 
To Jesus Christ the law of God is absolute, 
sacred; the violation of the law, and sin, are 
odious to him; but the sinner himself irresisti- 
bly moves him and attracts him: “ What man 
of you, having a hundred sheep, if he lose 
one of them, doth not leave the ninety and 
nine in the wilderness, and go after that which 
is lost, until he find it? And when he hath 
found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing. 
And when he cometh home, he calleth together 
his friends and neighbors, saying unto them, 
Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep 
which was lost. I say unto you, that likewise 
joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that re- 
penteth, more than over ninety and nine just 
persons, which need no repentance.”* Jesus 


said unto them, “They that are whole need 


* Luke xv, 4-7. 


* 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 291 


not a physician, but they that are sick... . 
For I am not come to call the righteous, but 
sinners to repentance.” * 

What is the signification of this sublime 
fact; what the meaning in Jesus of this union, 
this harmony of severity and of love, of saint- 
like holiness and of human sympathy? It is 
Heaven’s revelation of the nature of Jesus him- 
self, of the God-man. God, he made himself 
man. God is his father, men are his brethren. 
He is pure and holy like God: he is accessible 
and sensible to all that man feels, Thus the 
vital principles of the Christian faith, the 
divine and the human nature united in Jesus, 
start to evidence, in his sentiments and lan- 
guage respecting the relations between God 
and man. The dogma is the foundation of the 
principles. 

Another fact is not less significant. At the 
same time that the divine and mysterious char- 
acter of Jesus Christ appears in the Gospel, his 


* Matt. ix, 12, 13. 


¥. 


* 
‘ 


292 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


acts and his words have a character essentially 
simple and practical. He pursues no learned 
object, no scientific plan; he develops no sys- 
tem ; his object is something infinitely grander 
than the triumph of any logical abstraction: it 
is to pervade the human soul, to establish him- 
self in it—to save it. He speaks the language, 
he appeals to the ideas most calculated to insure 
him success. Sometimes he addresses himself 
to the task of inspiring in men the most poig- 
nant disquietude as to their future destiny, if 
they violate the laws of God; at other times 
he causes to shine before their eyes the realiza- 
tion of the most magnificent hopes, if with sin- 
cerity they persist in faith, He knows the 
generation that he 1s addressing; he knows 
human nature in its universality, and what it 
will be in future generations: his object is to 
produce upon it an effect at once positive, gen- 
eral, durable; he chooses the ideas, he employs 
the images suitable to his design for the regen- 


eration and the salvation of all. God’s Em- 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 293 


bassador is the most penetrating and able of 
human moralists. | 

More than once the attempt has been made 
to find him at fault, to detect in his language 
exaggerations, contradictions, incoherencies, ir- 
reconcilable with his divine authority. Sur- 
prise, for instance, has been expressed, that he 
should have one day said, according to St. Mat- 
thew: “He that is not with me is against me ; 
and he that gathereth not with me scattereth 
abroad ;”* and that he should another day, ac- 
cording to St. Mark, have used the expression, 
“For he that is not against us is on our part.” + 
These two passages have been characterized as 
furnishing “two rules of proselytism entirely 
opposed to each other, and as involving a contra- 
diction growing out of some impassioned strug- 
gle.” { In my turn I observe that it astonishes 
me how earnest men can fall into any such error. 
Jesus does not lay down in these two passages 


5 Matt. xii, 30. + Mark ix, 40. 
$ Vie de Jésus, par M. Renan, p. 229. 


294 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


two contradictory rules of proselytism, he mere- 
ly observes and refers in turn to two different 
facts: who has not learned, in the course of 
actual life, that, according to the difference 
of circumstances and persons, the man who 
abstains from active concurrence, who keeps 
himself aloof, by that very fact may at one 
time give support and strength, and at another 
injure and impede? These two assertions, far 
from being in contradiction, may be both true, 
and Jesus Christ, in uttering them, spoke as a 
sagacious observer, not as a moralist who is 
enunciating precepts. I have heard other 
critics reproachfully regard another passage as 
a sort of blasphemy. According to St. Luke: 
“There was in a city a judge, which feared not 
God, neither regarded man; and there was a 
widow in that city; and she came unto him, 
saying, Avenge me of mine adversary. And 
he would not for a while: but afterward he 
said within himself, Though I fear not God, nor 


regard man; yet because this widow troubleth 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 295 


me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual 
coming she weary me.” * 

Is it possible to infer from these words an 
intention on the part of Jesus to liken God to 
an unjust judge, and to make the mere impor- 
tunate persistence in praying a claim to God’s 
grace? He only cited an occurrence which 
made noise in his time, in order to instill a 
lively impression of the utility of persever- 
ance. To attain his end, he never makes use of 
out-of-the-way or impure expedients; but he 
draws from the ordinary events of human life 
examples and reasons to illustrate and render 
intelligible the divine precepts, and to insure 
their acceptance. All the parables have this 
meaning and object. 

Next to the precepts which refer to the rela- 
tions of man with God come those which 
respect the relations of men with one another. 
While Faith and Hope regard God, Charity 
has man for its object. 


* Luke xviii, 1-5. 


296 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


Charity, it has often been repeated, is the 
great ‘principle of Jesus Christ, pre-eminently 
the Christian virtue. I know not, however, 
whether the source whence Christian charity’ 
derives its character and grandeur has been 
adequately perceived or remarked. 

In the different pagan religions, whether of 
- character gross or learned, we have deifications 
of the different forces of nature or of men 
themselves. And even in those religions in 
which gods in their turn are said to assume 
man’s shape, it is man particularly that is pre- 
dominant, and that lives in the incarnation of 
God. Whereas in Christianity it is not a god 
sprung from nature or of human origin that 
becomes man, but the God self-existent, ante- 
rior, and superior to all beings, the God, One, 
Eternal. The Hebrew religion, alone of all 
religions, shows God essentially and eternally 
distinct from the nature and the mankind that 
he has created, and that he governs. The 


Christian faith alone shows God one and eter- 


EIGHTH MEDITATION, 297 


nal; the God of Abraham and of Moses mak- 
ing himself man, and the divine nature uniting 
itself to the human nature in the person of Je- 
sus. And in this union it is the divine nature 
that shines forth, that speaks, that sets in move- 
ment. “And this incarnation is unparalleled 
like the God its author. 

_And why did God make himself man? 
What is the object of this unparalleled, this 
mysterious incarnation? It is God’s purpose 
to rescue man from the evil and the peril 
which have continued to weigh upon him since 
the fault committed by his first progenitor. 
It is God’s purpose to ransom the human race 
from the sin of Adam, the heritage of Adam’s 
children, and to bring-it back to the ways of 
eternal life. These are the designs, loudly 
proclaimed, of the divine incarnation in 
‘Jesus, and the price of all the sufferings 
and agonies which he endured in its accom- 
plishment. 


Need I say more? Who does not see how 


298 THE OHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


this sublime fact exalts man’s dignity at the 
same time that it illustrates the worth of man’s 
nature? By the mere fact of God having 
assumed his form is man’s nature glorified; and 
all men, so to say, have their share of the 
honor done by God to humanity in uniting 
himself with it, and in accepting, for a moment 
of time, all the conditions of humanity. But 
as far as mankind is here concerned, it is far 
more than a mere accession of an honor or a 
glorifying of his nature: it is a striking mani- 
festation of the value that all men have in the 
eyes of God. For it is not for some of them 
only, for some class or nation, or portion of 
humanity, it is for all humanity that God 
became incarnate in Jesus Christ, and that 
Jesus Christ has submitted to all human suffer- 
ings. Every human soul is the object of this 
divine sacrifice, and called upon to gather the 
fruit. 

This is the source, this the privilege of Chris- 


tian charity. The dogma makes the force of 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 299 


the precept itself. Jesus crucified is God’s 
charity toward man. Impossible that men 
should not feel themselves bound to act toward 
each other as God has done to them; and 
toward what man is not charity a duty? 
Without the divinity and sacrifice of Jesus 
Christ, the value of man’s soul, if I may be 
pardoned the expression, sinks — neither his 
salvation nor the example of his Saviour is any 
longer the question—charity becomes nothing 
more than human goodness; a sentiment, how- 
ever noble and useful, still limited both in 
impulsive energy and in efficacy; having its 
source in man alone, it can but incompletely 
solace the unequally distributed sufferings of 
mortality. It is not suited to inspire any long 
effort or great sacrifice: it is not adequate to 
convert the longing desire for the moral amend- 
ment, the physical relief of humanity, into that 
inextinguishable sympathy and untiring and 
impassioned emotion which really constitute 
charity, and which the Christian Faith, in the 


i ‘ 
300 THE peractiaciaks RELIGION. ' 
history of the world, has alone been able to 
inspire. 

Thus the essential precepts of Jesus, the vir- 
tues which he commands as the basis and 
source of all the others, have an intimate con- 
nection with his doctrine, a doctrine “ which 1s 
not,” he tells us himself, “és, but of him that 
sent him;” that is to say, they are connected 
with the fundamental dogmas of the Christian 
religion. No one denies the perfection, the 
sublimity of the Gospel morality; men indeed 
seem to feel a sort of self-complacency, a satis- 
faction in celebrating it, with a view to the 
conclusion, more or less explicitly stated, that 
that morality constitutes the whole Gospel. 
This 1s, however, not less than absolutely to 
mistake the bond which unites in man thought 
with sentiment, and belief with action. Man is 
grander and less easy to satisfy than superficial 
moralists pretend; the law of his life 1s for 
him, in the profound instinct of his soul, neces- 


sarily connected with the secret of his destiny ; 


oe 


i 
‘ 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 301 
and it is only the Christian dogma that gives 
to Christian ethics the Royal authority of 


which they stand in need to govern and to 


regenerate humanity. 


QI. JESUS AND HIS MIRACLES. 


I nave called myself one of those who admit 
the supernatural, and I have stated my reasons. 
I might stop there and enter into no special re- 
flection as to the Gospel miracles. The possi- 
bility of miracles once accorded in principle, 
nothing remains but to weigh the value of the 
testimony in their support. In the second se- 
ries of these Meditations, where I treat of the 
authenticity of the localities specified in the 
Holy Scriptures, I shall occupy myself with 
this examination. It is not, however, my wish 
to elude, upon the subjects that lie at the bot- 
tom of this question, any of the difficulties that 
it presents ; for here we find the point of attack 


sought by the adversaries of the Christian faith. 


& 


302 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


The image of Christ as it results from the 
Gospel would be besides singularly unfaithful 
did we not range in it his miracles by the side 
of his precepts. | : 

I avow once more my belief in God, in God 
the Creator, the Sovereign Master of the Uni- 
verse, who orders it and governs it by that 
independent and constant action of his provi- 
dence and power styled the laws of nature. 
To those who regard nature as having existed 
from all eternity of itself, and governed by laws 
immutable and proceeding from fate, I have 
nothing to say of Jesus or his miracles; the 
question at issue between them and me is more 
important than that which respects miracles; 
it involves the very question of Pantheism or 
Christianity, of Fatalism or Liberty, affecting 
both God and man. Upon these subjects I 
have already expressed my general opinion and 
its grounds. I propose to enter further upon it 
in the third series of these JJeditations, when I 


come to speak of the different systems which 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 3038 


are now in conflict throughout Christendom. 
But at this moment I address myself to Deists 
and to men of wavering minds, and to these 
alone. 

One thing is beyond all doubt: the perfect 
sincerity of the apostles and of the primitive 
Christians as to their faith in the miracles of 
Jesus. Sincerity still more striking that it is 
united to every sort of hesitation in the mind 
and weakness in the conduct, and that it only 
triumphs gradually and slowly when Jesus has 
quitted his disciples and has left them alone 
charged with his work. While he was with 
them, St. Peter has failed, St. Thomas has 
doubted ; after several miracles have been per- 
formed by Jesus, his disciples are astonished, 
put questions to him, yet still doubt of him and 
of his power. Upon several occasions Jesus ad- 
dresses them as men “of little faith,” and at the 
moment when he is arrested they abandon 
him, they fly from him. No impassioned en- 


thusiasm, no exaggeration in their trustfulness 


304 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


and their devotedness; even with them Jesus 
sees himself confronted by all the vacillations 
and pusillanimity of humanity; he persuades 
them, he wins them, he preserves them only by 
great exertion, and by dint, so to say, of divine 
power and divine virtue. They only really be- 
lieve in him after having witnessed the ac- 
complishment of his sacrifice and his last. mira- 
cle, when they had seen his Crucifixion and his 
Resurrection. Only then they believed; but 
from that moment their faith became absolute, 
superior to all perils and all trials; full of the 
Holy Spirit, and associated in a certain measure 
to their divine Master, they pursue his“work 
with unshaken confidence and firmness, without 
pretending to any merit, without any impulse 
of personal pride. Before “ the gate of the 
Temple which 1s called Beautiful,” St. Peter has 
healed a lame man and made him to walk. 
“ And as the lame man which was healed held 
Peter and John, all the people ran together 


unto them in the porch that is called Solomon’s, 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 305 


greatly wondering. And when Peter saw it, he 
answered unto the people, Ye men of Israel, 
why marvel ye at this? or why look ye so 
earnestly on us, as though by our own power 
or holiness we had made this man _ to walk 2 
... Ye killed the Prince of life, whom God 
hath raised from the dead; whereof we are 
witnesses. And his name through faith in his 
name hath made this man strong, whom ye see 
and know : yea, the faith which is by him hath 
given him this perfect soundness in the presence 
of you all.”* It was not the people only that 
felt astonishment, but “the rulers and elders ; 
the scribes, the high priest, and all those who 
were of the kindred of the high priest, were 
gathered together at Jerusalem, and set in their 
midst” Peter and John, and after a deliberation 
full of anxiety, they “commanded them not to 
speak at all, nor teach in the name of Jesus, 
But Peter and John answered and said unto 
them, Whether it be right in the sight of God 


-* Acts iii, 1-16, 
: 20 


\ 
306 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


to hearken unto you more than unto God, 
judge ye. For we cannot but speak the things 
we have seen and heard.” * 

What sincerity and what firmness ever 
showed themselves more strikingly than those 
that grew out of the faith of St. Paul? From 
such faith he had been originally further re- 
moved than the other apostles; he had done 
far more than merely err like Peter or doubt 
like Thomas; he had hotly persecuted the first 
followers of Christ. In his turn penetrated 
and subdued on the road to Damascus by the 
voice of Jesus, he devotes himself to him life 
and soul; he recounts himself his miraculous 
conversion,+ and as little doubt can be enter- 
tained of the authenticity of his Epistles as of 
the sincerity that dictated them. 

The history of all religions abound in mira- 
cles; but in all religions, except the Christian, 
the miracles recounted by their historians are 


* Acts iv, 5, 6, 18-20. 
t 1 Cor. xv, 8; 2 Cor. xi, 82, 88; xii, 1-5; Gal. i, 1-4. 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 307 


evidently either contrivances of the founder to 
induce persuasion, or they spring from the play 
of the human imagination, ever disposed to 
delight in the marvelous, ever particularly 
prone to give way in the sphere of religion to 
its fantastic suggestions. In the Gospel mira- 
cles, on the contrary, we have nothing of the 
| kind ; no artifice in their Author; none of the 
marvelous machinery of poetry, nor any hasty 
credulity in the historians. The miraculous 
agency of Christ is essentially simple, practical, 
and moral: he does not go in search of mira- 
cles, neither does he make any vain display of 
them: they are wrought when a pressing emer- 
gency or a natural occasion calls for them; and 
when they are demanded in faith and in trust, 
he then works them without ostentation and in 
right of his divine mission; while at the very 
moment he makes the doubt and the coldness 
with which he is received the subject of com- 
plaint: “Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto 


thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, 


308 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


which were done in you, had been done in 
Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented 


»* Jesus has 


long ago in sackcloth and ashes. 
full confidence in himself, in the miracles that 
he effects, in the doctrine that he inculcates. 
He feels no astonishment, but merely sorrow, 
that his work, the work of light and of salva- 
tion, pursued by him in accordance with the 
will of God his Father, should not obtain a 
more rapid, a more general success. 

As for us, remote spectators, the astonish- 
ment must be not the slowness or limited 
nature of that success, but its rapidity and its 
extent.- All religions that have taken place in 
the world’s history have been established by 
moral and by material agency; all appealed 
from their very commencement as much to 
force as to persuasion, as much to the arm as to 
the tongue. Christianity alone lived and grew 
during three centuries by its own single native 
virtue, without any other appeal than that 


* Matt. xi, 21. 


_ EIGHTH MEDITATION. 309 


made to Truth, without any other aid than 
that of Faith. During those three centuries 
the dogmas, the precepts, and the miracles of 
its Author constituted its only weapons, and 
weapons which have prevailed against all other 
arms. Those dogmas, those precepts, and 
those miracles effected the conquest of man’s 
mind and of human society in spite of the 
resistance of Greek philosophy, Roman power, 
and all the poetical or mystical mythologies of 
antiquity marshaled against them. The vic. 
tory has not, it is true, put an end to all strug- 
gle of man’s intelligence: neither has the hight 
from Christ dissipated all darkness, nor sgatis- 
fied all minds; the explanation and comment 
aries of man have obscured the doctrines of 
Christ; human prejudices have mistaken his 
precepts ; and legends have been grafted upon 
his miracles. But the fact does not the less 
exist, that the dogmas, the precepts, and the 
miracles of Christ, without any aid from human 


sources, sufficed to found and insure the 


810 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


triumph of the Christian religion: this is a 
fact primitive and supreme. And from this 
single result shines forth the divine character 
of the Christian religion, for its triumph with- 
out the miraculous agency of God would be of 


all miracles the most impossible to receive. 


IV. JESUS, THE JEWS, AND THE GENTILES. 


“Tink not that I am come to destroy the 
law, or the prophets: I am not come to de- 
stroy, but to fulfill.” * 

“Do not think that I will accuse you to the 
Father: there is one that accuseth you, even 
Moses, in whom ye trust. For had ye believed 
Moses, ye would have believed me; for he 
wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writ- 
ings, how shall ye believe my words?” t This 
was the language that Jesus used to the Jews. 
It was in the name of their history and of their 
faith, in the name of the God of Abraham and 

* Matt. v, 17. + John v, 45-47. 


\ 


EIGHTH MEDITATION, 811 


of Jacob, that he called them to him, present- 
ing himself to them in the double capacity of 
conservative and reformer, and appealing to 
the ancient law against those who, while ob- 
serving it outwardly, really changed its char- 
acter. “Then came to Jesus scribes and Phari- 
sees, which were of Jerusalem, saying, Why do 
thy disciples transgress the tradition of the 
elders? for they wash not their hands when 
they eat bread. But he answered and said 


unto them, Why do ye also transgress the 


commandment of God by your tradition? For 


God commanded, saying, Honor thy father and 


mother: and, He that curseth father or | 


mother, let him die the death. But ye say, 
Whosoever shall say to his father or his 
mother, It is a gift, by whatsoever thou might- 
est be profited by me; and honor not his 
father or his mother, he shall be free. Thus 
ye have made the commandment of God of 
none effect by your tradition!* .. . Woe unto 


* Matt. xv, 1-6. 


*’ 


$12 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye 
pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and 
have omitted the weightier matters of the law, 
judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye 
to have done, and not to leave the other 
undone.” * 

Jesus was incessantly warning, making ap- 
peals to the Jews; and when he saw that they 
pertinaciously disavowed and rejected him, he 
cried, in an impulse of patriotic, affectionate 
sadness, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which 
killest the prophets, and stonest them that are 
sent unto thee; how often would I have gath- 
ered thy children together, as a hen doth gath- 
er her brood under her wings, and ye would 
not!” + 

I know nothing more imposing than the 
apparition of a grand idea, a divine rising and 
mounting rapidly upon the human horizon. 
Such is the spectacle afforded to us in its short 
duration by the history of Jesus Christ. 3 


* Matt. xxiii, 28. t Matt. xxiii, 37; Luke xiii, 84. 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 818 - 


his first instructions to his apostles, he said to 
them, “Go.not to the Gentiles and enter not 
into any city of the Samaritans; but go ye 
rather to the lost sheep of the people of Israel.” 
Thus he carefully avoided offending the senti- 
ments of the day, and only enjoined upon his 
apostles what they might do with success at 
the very beginning of their mission. But soon 
the light increases that issues from the words 
and the actions of Jesus; as I advance in the 
books of the Gospel I there read: “ And when 
Jesus was entered into Capernaum, there came 
unto him a centurion, beseeching him, and say- 
ing, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the 
palsy, grievously tormented. And Jesus saith 
unto him, I will come and heal him. The cen- 
turion answered and said, Lord, I am not 
worthy that thou shouldest come under my 
roof: but speak the word only, and my servant 
shall be healed. For I am a man under author- 
it, having soldiers under me: and I say to this 


man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, 


314 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, 
and he doeth it. When Jesus heard it, he mar- 
veled, and said to them that followed, Verily I 
say unto you, I have not found so great faith, 
no, not in Israel. And I say unto you, That 
many shall come from the east and west, and 
shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and 
Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.” * 

Thus a great stride has been made; it is no 
longer for the sheep of the house of Israel that 
Jesus has come; from the east and from the 
west will men come to him, and he will receive 
them all. To continue the Gospel narrative: 
departing from the borders of the lake of Gen- 
nesareth, Jesus “departed into the coasts of 
Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a woman of 
Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried 
unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, 
thou son of David; my daughter is grievously 
vexed with a devil. But he answered her not 


a word. And his disciples came and besought 


* Matt. viii, 5-11, 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 315 


him, saying, Send her away; for she crieth 
after us. But he answered and said, I am not 
sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of 
Israel. Then came she and worshiped him, 
saying, Lord, help me. But he answered and 
said, It js not meet to take the children’s bread, 
and to cast it to dogs. And she said, Truth, 
Lord; yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall 
from their master’s table. Then Jesus answered 
and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith: 
be it unto thee even as thou wilt.” * 

Another day, near the city Sychar and the 
ewell of Jacob, Jesus conversed with a woman of 
Samaria, who had come there to draw water: — 
“The woman*saith unto him, Sir, I perceive 
that thou art a prophet. Our fathers wor- 
shiped in this mountain; and ye say, that in 
Jerusalem is the place where men ought to 
worship. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, be- 
lieve me, the hour cometh, when ye shall 


neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, 


* Matt. xv, 21-28. 


316 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


worship the Father. . . . But the hour cometh, 
and now is, when the true worshipers shall wor- 
ship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the 
Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a 
Spirit: and they that worship him must worship 
him in spirit and in truth.” * , 
Thus disappears gradually, in the name of 


the God of the Jews himself, the exclusive priv- 


| ilege of the Jews to the divine revelation and 


to divine grace. And thus, too, the restricted 
religion of Israel gives place to the grand 
catholicity of the religion of Christ. The ben-: 
efit of the true faith and of salvation is nog 


longer limited to one people, whether great or 


small, ancient or modern; but is imparted to 


all the races of mankind. “Go ye therefore, 


‘and teach all nations, baptizing them in the 


name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the 


Holy Ghost.”+ ‘And he said unto them, Go 
ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to 


every creature.” { 


* John iv, 5-24. + Matt. xxviii, 19. { Mark xvi, 15. 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 317 


These were the last words which Christ 
addressed to his apostles, and the apostles exe- 
eute faithfully the instructions of their divine 
Master ; they go forth in effect, preaching in all 
places and to all nations his history, his doc- 
trine, his precepts, and his parables. St®Paul 
is the special apostle of the Gentiles. From 
Jesus, says this apostle, “ We have received 
grace and apostleship, for obedience to the faith 
among all nations, for his name.” “Is he the 
God of the Jews only? is he not also of the 
Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also.” “For 
there is no difference between the Jew and the 
Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto 
all that call upon him.”* 

In spite of his prejudices as a Jew, and of 
the differences that took place in the infancy of 
the Church, St. Peter adheres to St. Paul; the 
apostles and the elders assembled at Jerusalem 
adhere to St. Peter and St. Paul. "The God of 


Abraham and of Jacob is not now merely the 


_* Romans i, 5; iii, 29; x, 12. 


“* 


318 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


One God, he is the God of the whole human 
race; to all men alike he prescribes the same 
faith, the same law, and promises the same 
salvation. | 

Another question, more temporal in its na-_ 
ture, still a great, a delicate one, is raised in the 
presence of Jesus Christ. He withdraws from 
the Jews their exclusive privilege to the knowl- 
edge and the grace of the true God; but what 
does he think of that which touches their exist- 
ence as a nation, and as a great one? Does He 
direct them to rebel and to struggle against 
their earthly governor and sovereign? “Then 
went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they 
might entangle him in his talk.. And they sent 
out unto him their disciples with the Herodi- 
ans, saying, Master, we know that thou art true, 
and teachest the way of God in-truth, neither 
carest thou for any man: for thou regardest 
not the person of men. Tell us therefore, 
What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give trib- 


ute unto Cesar, or not? But Jesus perceived 


tw! 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 319 


their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, 
ye hypocrites? Shew me the tribute money. 
And they brought unto him a penny. And he 
saith unto them, Whose is this image and 
superscription? They say unto him, Cesar’s. 
Then saith he unto them, Render therefore 
unto Cesar the things which are Cesar’s; and 
unto God the things that are God’s. When 
they had heard these words, they marveled, 
and left him, and went their way.” * 

In this reply of Christ there was much more 
matter for admiration than the Pharisees sup- 
posed; it was in effect much more than an 
adroit evasion of the snare that had been ex- 
tended for him; it defined in principle the dis- 
tinction of man’s life as it regards religion, and 
man’s life as it concerns society ; the bounds, in 
fact, of Church and of State. Cesar has no 
right to intervene, with his laws and material 
force, between the soul of man and his God; 
and on his side, the faithful worshiper of God 


* Matt. xxii, 15-22; Mark xii, 12-17; Luke xx, 19-25. 


320 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


is bound to fulfill toward Cesar the duties 
which the necessity of the maintenance of civil 
order imposes. The independence of religious 
faith, and at the same time its subjection to the 
laws of society, are alike the sense of Christ’s 
reply to the Pharisees, and the divine source of 
the greatest progress ever made by human so- 
ciety since it began to feel the troubles and 
agitations of this earth. 

I take again these two grand principles, 
these two great acts of Jesus: the abolition of 
every privilege in the relations of God and 
man, and the distinction of man’s religious and 
his civil life. I confront with these two prin- 
ciples all the history, and every state of society 
previous to the advent of Jesus Christ, and I 
am unable to discover in those essentially 
Christian ‘principles any kindred, any human 
origin. Everywhere before Christ, religions 
were national local religions; they were re- 
ligions which established between nations, 


classes, individuals, enormous differences and 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. - 822 


inequalities. Everywhere, also, before Christ, 
man’s civil life and his religious life were con- 
founded, and mutually oppressed each other ; 
that religion or those religions were institu- 
tions incorporated in the state, which the state 
regulated or repressed as its interest dictated. 
But in this catholicity of religious faith, in this 
independence of religious communities, I am 
constrained to recognize new and sublime prin- 
ciples, and to see in them flashes from the light 
of heaven. It needed many centuries before 
mental vision was capable of receiving that 
ight; and no one shall pronounce how many 
centuries will be needed before it will pervade 
and penetrate the entire world. But whatever 
difficulties and shortcomings may be reserved 
in the womb of the future for the two great 
truths to which I have just referred, it is clear 
_ that God caused them first to beam forth from 
the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. 
21 


822 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


Vv. JESUS AND WOMEN. 


Ar the very source of all religions, as well as 
in their subsequent history, women find a place 
to fill and a part to perform. At one time 
they constitute the material and furnish the 
ornament of licentious systems of mythology. 
At another, on the contrary, they are, for 
the heroes of those religions, objects either 
of pious horror or of observances at once 
rigorous and austere: women are considered 
by them as creatures full of evil and of 
peril; and they are accordingly thrust 
from their lives as men thrust from them 
what is a temptation and an impurity. 
Voluptuous pictures and adventures on the 
one hand, and zealous impulses of rigid ascet- 
icism on the other, constitute the two ex- 
tremes to which religions in their ages of 
youth and of vigor are alternately prone. 


Sometimes—and it is more fortunate for wo- 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 328 


men when it is the case—they are described jn 
.the narrative of these religions such as they 
really are in human life, charmers and at the 
same time charmed, seducers and seduced, idols 
and slaves ; at first votaries of the enthusiasm, 
the victims of the errors and the passions which 
they at once inspire and feel. Whether 
Asiatic or European, rude or refined, such are 
the striking features with which all systems of 
religion, excepting Christianity, have character- 
ized the women whom they have introduced in 
their narratives, 

Neither of these characteristics, nor anything 
analogous, is met with in the Gospel and in the 
relations of Jesus with women, They seem 
irresistibly attracted toward him, with hearts 
moved, imaginations struck by his manner of 
life, his precepts, his miracles, his language. 
He inspires them with feelings of tender respect 
and confiding admiration. The Canaanitish 
woman comes and addresses to him a timid 


prayer for the healing of her daughter. The 


3294 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


woman of Samaria listens to him with eager- 
ness, though she does not know him: Mary 
seats herself at his feet, absorbed in reflections 
suggested by his words; and Martha proffers 
to him the frank complaint that her sister 
assists her not, but leaves her unaided in the 
performance of her domestic duties. The sin- 
ner draws near to,him in tears, pouring upon 

his feet a rare perfume, and wiping them with | 
her hair. The adulteress, hurried into his 
presence by those who wished to stone her, in 
accordance with the precepts of the Mosaic 
Law, remains motionless in his presence, even 
after her accusers have withdrawn, waiting in 
silence what he is about to say. Jesus receives 
the homage, and listens to the prayers of all 
these women with the gentle gravity and im- 
partial sympathy of a being superior and 
strange to earthly passion. Pure and inflex- 
ible interpreter of the Divine law, he knows 
and understands man’s nature, and judges it 


with that equitable severity which nothing 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 825 


escapes, the excuse as little as the fault. Faith, 
sincerity, humanity, sorrow, repentance, touch 
him without biasing the charity and the jus- 
tice of his conclusions; and he expresses blame 
or announces pardon with the same calm serenity 
of authority, certain that his eye has read the 
depths of the heart to which his words will 
penetrate. In his relations with the women 
who approach him, there is, in short, not the 
slightest trace of man; nowhere does the God- 
head manifest itself more winningly and with 
greater purity. 

And when there is no longer any question of 
these particular relations and conversations, 
when Jesus has no longer before him women 
suppliants and sinners, who are invoking his 
power or imploring his clemency ; when it is 
with the position and the destiny of women in 
general that he is occupying himself, he affirms 
and defends their claims and their dignity with 
a sympathy at once penetrating and severe. 


He knows that the happiness of mankind, as 


326 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


well as the moral position of women, depends 
essentially upon the married state; he makes 


of the Pasi of oe: a fundamental law 
of ( ) 


5 i of men, “Have ye not read, that he 


which made them at the beginning made them 
male and female? ... For this cause shall a 
man leave father and mother, and shall cleave 
to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh. 
Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. 
What therefore God hath joined together, 
let not man put asunder. They say unto him, 
Why did Moses then command to give a writ- 
ing of divorcement, and to put her away? He 
saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness 
of your hearts suffered you to put away your 
wives: but from the beginning it was not, so. 
And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away 
his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall 
marry another, committeth adultery: and 


& 
i 


e 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 327% 


whoso marrieth her which is put away doth 
commit adultery.” * 

Signal and striking testimony to A pro- 
gressive action of God upon the human race! 
Jesus Christ restores to the divine law of mar- nd 
riage the purity and the authority that Moses 
had not enjoined to the Hebrews “because of eo 
the hardness of their hearts.” 


Ss 


VI. JESUS CHRIST AND CHILDREN. 


THE sentiments expressed by Jesus Christ 
toward children, and the language that he uses 
toward them, as these appear in the Gospel 
narrative, must strike even the most careless 
reader. Let me refer to the passages them- 
selves : 

“ And they brought young children to him, 
that he should touch them: and his disciples 

* Matt. xix, 4-9; v, 27; 28; Mark x, 2-12; Romans vii, 2, 8; 
1 Cor. vi, 16-18 ; vii, 1-11. 

4 


328 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


rebuked those that brought them. But when 
Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said 
unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto 
me, and forbid them not: for of such is the 


kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Who- 


_ soever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a 
© little child, he shall not enter therein. And he 


took them up in his arms, put his hands upon 
them, and blessed them.” * 

Another day, “came the disciples unto Jesus, 
saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of 
heaven? And Jesus called a little child unto 
him, and set him in the midst of them, and 
said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be con- 
verted, and become as little children, ye shall 
not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Who- 
soever therefore shall humble himself as this 
little child, the same is greatest in the king- 
dom of heaven.”+ 

Again another day, Jesus, deploring the cold- 


* Mark x, 13-16; Matt. xix, 18-15; Luke xviii, 15-17. 
+ Matt. xviii, 1-4; Mark ix, 33-87. 


BFIGHTH MEDITATION. 329 


ness that his preaching and his miracles fre- 
quently encountered, and that even in his 
closest vicinity, exclaimed, here no longer ad- 
dressing his disciples, but God himself, “I thank 
thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, be- 
cause thou hast hid these things from the wise 
and prudent, and hast revealed them unto 
babes.” * 

What is the full meaning of these words ? 
They are not simply the expression of that im- 
pulse of gentle benevolence excited in all hearts 
at the sight of children, and their innocent con- 
fidence in all who come near them. Jesus 
Christ no doubt experienced the influence of 
this feeling, for he was strange to none of man’s 
noble emotions; but his thoughts passed far 
beyond the children whose approach he per- 
mitted, and they merely furnished him with 
the living occasion to address to men them- 
selves his solemn warnings. 

The child, I have already mentioned in these 


* Matt, xi, 25. 


330 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


Meditations,” is, for us, the image of innocence, 
the type of the creature fallible, yet who has 
not yet sinned, who knows not yet either error 
of understanding, or-the seduction of passion, or 
the blinding influence of pride, or the troubles 
of doubt, or the extreme folly of sin, or the 
anguish of repentance; who follows in the first 
impulses of infancy only the spontaneous in- 
stincts of tender confidence in the parent to 
whom he is indebted for security and for love, 
for the first joys and the earliest blessings. 
Jesus does not pretend to bring men back to 
that fair condition, to restore to them their 
primitive innocence; but he comes to ransom 
them from sin; he brings them the hope of 
pardon and salvation. Confidence in God, a 
confidence sincere, unpretending, and loving, 
is that disposition which opens the soul of 
man to the divine blessing. This is also the 
disposition that the child evinces toward its 
parents; he calls upon them, and he hopes 


* Meditation II, Christian Dogmas, p. 48. 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 33% 


in them. Hence those words of Jesus: “Suf- 
fer little children to -come unto me, and forbid 
them not, for of such is the kingdom of 
heaven.” The way of innocence is a far bet- 
ter way than that of science to lead man up 
to God. 

Science is a splendid thing; it is also a noble 
privilege of man that God, in creating him an 
intelligent and a free agent, has given-him a 
capacity to desire and to pursue through study 
the truths of science, and even to attain them 
in a certain measure, and in a certain sphere. 
But when science attempts to exceed that 
measure and to quit that sphere; when it 
ignores and scorns the instincts—natural, uni- 
versal, and permanent instincts of the human 
soul; when it essays to set up everywhere its 
own torch in the place of that primitive light 
that lights mankind ; then, and from that cause 
alone, science fills itself with error; and this is 
the very case which called forth those words of 


Jesus: “I praise thee, Father, Lord of heaven 


l\ gon THE OHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


and of earth, that thou hast hidden those 
things from the wise and prudent, and hast 


revealed them unto babes.” * 


VII. JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF. 


I HAVE sought to gather from the Gospels 
the scattered facts that constitute the life of 
Jesus. I have searched for them in his acts, 
his precepts, his words: in his different rela- 
tions in life. I have added nothing, exag- 
gerated nothing; on the contrary, the life of 
Jesus is infinitely grander and more sublime 
than I have made it; his words are infinitely 
more profound and admirable than I have 
described them. And I have said nothing of 


the seal affixed to his work and his mission. by 


* Matt. xi, 25. The words 476 codév kai ovverdv are better 
rendered, ‘‘from the learned and the prudent,” than “ wise and 
intelligent ;” ‘ sages et intelligents,” as in the French version 
by Osterwald. 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 33S 


his Passion; nor have I shown Jesus at Geth- 
semane and upon the Cross. 

According to the Bible, God is without par- 
allel—ever the same. Jesus is also so accord- 
ing to the Gospel. The most perfect, the most 
constant unity reigns in him: in his life as in 
his soul; in his language as in his acts. His 
action is progressive, and proportionate to the 
circumstances which call it forth, and in the 
midst of which he lives; but his progress 
never entails any change of character or pur- 
pose. As he appears at the age of twelve, in 
the Temple, already full of the sentiment of his 
divine nature, in his reply to his mother who 
was searching for him with disquietude, 
“ Knowest thou not that I must be about my 
Father's business?” the same he remains and 
manifests himself in the whole course of his 
active mission—in Galilee and at Jerusalem, 
with his apostles and with the people, among 
the Pharisees and the Publicans, whether they 


be men, or women, or children who approach 


334 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


him; alike before Caiaphas and Pilate, and 
under the eyes of the crowd pressing around 
to listen to him. Everywhere, and in every 
circumstance, the same spirit animates him; 
he diffuses the same light, proclaims the same 
law. Perfect and immutable, always at once 
Son of God and Son of Man, he pursues and 
consummates amid all the trials and all the 
sorrows of human existence his divine work for 
the salvation of mankind. 

What need to add more? How speak in 
detail of Jesus himself when one believes in 
him, when one sees in him God made man, 
acting as God alone can act, and suffering all 
that man can suffer to ransom mankind from 
sin, and save it by bringing it back to God? 
How sound closely the mysteries of such a per- 
son and such a purpose? What passed in that 
divine soul during that human existence? 
Who shall explain those cries of agony of 
Jesus in the bosom of the most absolute faith 
in God his father and in himself, and those 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 385 


moments of horror at the approach of the 
sacrifice without the slightest hesitation in the 
sacrifice, without the smallest doubt as to its 
efficaciousness? This sublime fact, this inti- 
mate and continual intermixture of the divine 
and human finds no competent, no adequate 
expression in human speech, and the more we 
consider it the more difficult we find it to 
speak of it. 

Those who have no faith in Jesus, who admit 
not the supernatural character of his person, of 
his life, and of his work, do not feel this diffi- 
culty. Having beforehand done away with 
God and with miracles, the history of Jesus is 
for them nothing more than an ordinary his- 
tory, which they narrate and explain like any 
other biography of man. But such historians 
fall into a far different difficulty, and wreck 
themselves on a far different rock. The super- 
natural being and power of Jesus may be dis- 
puted, but the perfection, the sublimity of his 


actions and of his precepts, of his life and of 


336 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


his moral law, are incontestable. And in 
effect, not only are they not contested, but 
they are admired and celebrated enthusiastic- 
ally, and complacently, too; it would seem as 
if it were desired to restore to Jesus as man, 
and man alone, the superiority of which men 
deprive him in refusing to see in him the God- 
head. But then, what incoherence, what con- 
tradictions, what falsehood, what moral impos- 
sibility in his history, such as they make it; 
what a series of suppositions, irreconcilable 
with fact, nevertheless admitted! The man 
they make so perfect, so sublime, becomes by 
turns a dreamer or a charlatan; at once dupe 
and deceiver: dupe of his own mystical enthu- 
slasm in believing in his own miracles; de- 
ceiver in tampering with evidence in order to 
accredit himself. The history of Jesus Christ 
is thus but a tissue of fables and falsehood. 
And nevertheless the hero of this history 
remains perfect, sublime, imcomparable; the 


greatest genius, the noblest heart that the 


“= 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 337 


world ever saw; the type of virtue and moral 
beauty, the supreme and rightful chief of 
mankind. And his disciples, in their turn 
justly admirable, have braved everything, suf- 
fered everything, in order to abide faithful to 
him, and to accomplish his work. And, in 
effect, the work has been accomplished: the 
pagan world has become Christian, and the 
whole world has nothing better to do than to 
follow the example. 

What a contradictory and insolvable prob- 
lem they present to us instead of the one they 
are so anxious to suppress ! 

History reposes upon two foundations—posi- 
tive written evidence as to facts and persons, 
and presumptive evidence resulting from the 
connection of facts and the action of persons. 
These two foundations are entirely lost sight 
of in the history of Jesus such as it is re 
counted, or rather constructed, in these days ; 
it is, on the one hand, in evident and shock- 


ing contradiction with the testimony of the 
22 


338 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


men who saw Jesus, or of the men who lived 
nearly in the time of those who had seen 
him; on the other side, with the natural laws 
presiding over the actions of men and the 
course of events. This does not deserve the 
name of historical criticism; it is a philo- 
sophical system and a romantic narrative sub- 
stituted for the substantial proof and the cir- 
cumstantial evidence; it is a Jesus false and 
impossible, made by the hand of man pretend- 
ing to. dethrone the real living Jesus—the Son 
of God. | 

The choice lies between the system and the 
mystery; between the romance of man and 
the purpose of God. Even in revealing him- 
self God still interposes vails, but these vails 
are no falsehoods. ‘The Gospel history of 
Jesus shows us God acting in ways which 
are not his ways of every day. This special 
action of God characterizes also many other 
facts in the history of the universe; among 


others, the great fact of the actual creation, 


: 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 339 


where man, at his appearance upon earth, 
received the first divine revelation. The su- 
pernatural does not merely date from Jesus 
Christ; and if a man from this motive rejects 
the history of Jesus, he will have to deny 
also a far different thing. To escape this 
fatal necessity, men of learning have recently 
striven to curtail indefinitely the proportion 
of the supernatural in the history of Jesus, 
and to explain, by natural means, most of 
the acts and circumstances of his life. A 
puerile attempt, which has altogether failed 
in the details, still leaving untouched the 
substance of the problem. No better suc- 
cess will attend the new attempt that hag 
in these days been made, and which con- 
sists in placing the Ideal in the place of the 
Supernatural, and in elevating religious senti- 
ment upon the ruins of the Christian faith. 
This is doing either too much or too little, 
The human soul is not satisfied with these 


leavings, nor human pride with such refusals, 


” 


340 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


When one is so hardy as to pretend, in the 
name of the science of man in this finite world, 
to determine the limits of the power of God, 
one must be still more hardy and—dethrone 


God himself. 


4 Lael ddl dei Zi 


I sarp (p. 175) that I would indicate some 
instance of grammatical faults to be met with 
in the Scriptures, to which the character of 
divine inspiration cannot be assigned. Upon 
the subject of the books of the Old Testament 
I have consulted my ~ learned confrere, M. 


Munk; his reply is in the precise words which 


follow: 


“The biblical authors,” he writes to me, ‘* whose 
style is most incorrect, are Ezekiel and Jeremiah. 
These authors, and particularly the first, err frequent- 
ly against grammar and orthography ; they are not: 
merely influenced by the Aramean dialect, but they 
disclose grammatical faults capable of being traced 
to no source in any of the Semitic dialects. This re- 
mark has also been made by Hebrew grammarians of 
the middle ages, and Isaac Abrabanel, (toward the 
close of the 15th century,) in the preface to his com- 


342 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


mentary upon Ezekiel, does not hesitate to declare 
that this prophet was but superficially acquainted 
with Hebrew grammar and orthography. Neverthe- 
less, neither Jeremiah nor Ezekiel, of whom both 
are distinguished by a certain originality of style, 
unlike that of any of the other Hebrew writers, is 
wanting in elegance, energy, and boldness in images, 
and they display in the highest degree their pro- 
ficiency in the art of composition, The following 
are some instances of the grave faults against gram- 
mar to be met with in their writings : 


EXAMPLES OF INCORRECT EXPRESSIONS IN EZEKIEL. 


emannen mam (mischtwhawithem,) “and they wor- 
shiped” (viii, 16,)» a barbarism for pnnwn 
(mischtw hawim.) 

nox Suman (we-néschaar ani,) “and I remained” 
(xi, 8,) for wow (wa-éschaér) or 7NoNdn (we- 
nischarti.) (There are here faults both of or- 
thography and grammar.) 

ror (ischdth,) “ women ” (xxiii, 44,) for “3 (nesché.) 

sminy nvaw (schib’a,) “his seven burnt offerings (0.2 © 
96,) for yaw (scheba’.) In the number seven the 
masculine is used instead of the feminine. 

aspnaa (bi-bendthayikh,) “in that thou buildest we 
(xvi, 31,) instead of ypn223 (d2- -benothékh.) 

saws (be-schoubéni,) “when I returned” (xlvi, 7) 
instead of =awa (be-schoubi.) 


NOTE. 343 


hap xa (gabehd,) “his height was exalted” 
(xxxi, 5,) instead of mnaa (gabehd.) The last 
letter is aleph, for hé. 

The Chaldean plural is used in several words, for in- 
stance: yun (Azétin,) “wheat” (iv, 9,) for s»on 
Chettim ;) yn (ha-iyyin,) “the isles,” or “the 
isles in the sea” (xxvi, 18,) instead of town (ha- 
zyyvm,) an error in both orthography and gram- 
mar. 


EXAMPLES OF INCORRECT EXPRESSIONS IN JEREMIAH. 


mraw (dbidd,) “I will destroy” (xlvi, 8,) for naxx 
(aabidda.) 

may (nebbétha,) “hast thou prophesied” (xxvi, 9,) in- 

Stead of man (nibbétha.) The syllable dé has a 
yod instead of an aleph. 

naxh (athanow) “we come”? (iii, 22,) instead of 124m 
(athinou.) 

“nx (ait,) “thee” in the feminine (terminating with 
yod mute,) for nx (att,) a Syriasm very frequent 
in Jeremiah, who often forms the second person 
of the perfect fem. in “nm (¢ followed by yod) 
instead of n- (¢.) 

xp (/6 written with waw quiescent,) “not” very often 
for x) (26 without the waw.) 

neat (hoglath,) “shall be carried away captive ” (xiii, 
19,) instead of mnban (hoglethd.) The latter 
Chaldaism we meet also in the Pentateuch (Le- 


344 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


viticus xxv, 22;) movi (we’asath,) “her fruits 
(shall) come in,” for pnw (we’asetah,) and ibid. 
xxvi, 84; nym (we-hirzath,) “she shall enjoy,” 
for nos (we-hircethd.) 


With respect to the New Testament, I have 
required a similar notice from my son William, 
who has made the Greek language in general, 
and its deviations in the writings of the Gos- 
pel, the object of particular and careful study. 
I insert, also, the note which he has drawn up 
upon the subject: 


“ On first approaching the text of the New Testa- 
ment, after having learned the Greek language and 
grammar in the classical writers, we are struck by 
numerous irregularities of expression : among these, 
however, we must carefully distinguish those which 
constitute merely particular and singular modes of 
expression from those which are real faults. The 
former are susceptible of explanation and justifica- 
tion by different examples and different arguments ; 
the latter are not capable of being reconciled with 
the elementary and necessary laws of language. 
Thus we may justify such or such a strange form of 
conjugation or of declension, which would be ac- 
counted a barbarism by a schoolboy, but which was 
nevertheless in actual use in some one or other of the 


NOTE. 845 


local dialects written and spoken by the Greeks. 
Again, however it may have been the rule in Greek 
to set the verb in the singular when used with a neu- 
ter substantive in the plural, the rule has not been 
invariably observed even by the purest classical writ- 
ers, and we may justify, by exceptions collected here 
and there in their compositions, several passages of 
the New Testament which, at first sight, might ap- 
pear amenable to a charge of solecism. Thus, in 
short, after our attention having, at first sight, been 
arrested and our minds disconcerted by other pas- 
sages in which the sacred writer has confounded the 
sense of two words which resemble each other, as 
Haptopoyat, which signifies swmmon a witness, and 
which St. Peter employs instead of paprupéw, which 
means give testimony,* as ddvvdrew, which signifies 
to be incapable, and which St. Matthew and St. 
Mark employ in the sense of being impossible, +—as 
weooupavyjua, which signifies the meridian or zenith 
of @ star, and which, on three occasions in the New 
Testament, is used in the sense of in the middle of 
the avr—or, even when we meet words, not merely 
strange to the ear, but formed without attention to 
the rules and in contradiction to analogy, as tre0d¢ 
for mé0avog +—we may again, without any departure 
from logical rules, by judicious or subtle distinctions, 
escape from the difficulties which the passages sug- 


*1Pet.i, 11. + Matt. xvii, 20; Lukei, 37. $1 Cor. ii, 4. 


346 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


gest, and have a perfect right to do so. But after 
having made alléwances for the irregularities suscep- 

tible of explanation in the language of the New Test- 
ament, there still remain some which are real faults. 

The same word cannot be written by the same hand, 
at an interval of but three pages, both masculine and 
feminine, as the word ipic, rainbow, in the Apoca- 
lypse.* When the substantive is feminine, the ad- 
jective cannot be masculine, as THY Anvoyv . . TOV 
uéyav.+ When the substantive is in the accusative, 
the adjective cannot be in the nominative. In such 
an employment of words we are able to trace in the 
sacred writings the hand of man, marks of human 
imperfection and error ; and we must not forget that 
these faults become more numerous and grosser the 
greater the antiquity of the MS. in which we find 
them, and the purer the Jewish origin of the writer. 

Thus the Greek of the Apocalypse is singularly in- 
correct, at the same time that the imaginative turn of 
the expression is remarkably Hebraic.t In the text, 
styled the received text, and which was fixed in the 
16th century, many of these faults have disappeared, 
because it has borrowed from MSS. of then recent 
date. Butnow that biblical philosophy has mounted 

higher, we can discern how the copyists, one after the 3 


* Compare iv, 3, and x, 1. | t Apoc. xiv, 19. 
t Apoe. i, 16; ili, 12; iv, 7; ix, 18, 14; xiv, 12; xvi, 13; 
xx, 2, etc. 


NOTE. . 347 


other, actuated by pious scruples, or thinking only 
to correct some error of their predecessors, have lit- 
tle by little effaced what appeared to them too great 
a departure from rules to have been written by an 
evangelist or an apostle. At the present day, these 
admitted irregularities are an element indispensable 
to every serious discussion respecting the nature and 
extent of the divine inspiration to be met with in the 
sacred volume. 


NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. 


Tux following note by an American scholar, who 
is, like Guizot, a Christian layman and a collegiate 
professor, Dr. Tayler Lewis, of Union College, 
Schenectady, N. Y., will furnish a counter view upon 
the subject our author discusses: 


I think that M. Guizot has somewhat marred his excel- 
lent book by the above note. It is not easy to see pre- 
cisely what force or meaning he intended it should have. 
Although not distinguished as a biblical scholar, he must 
be aware that the question of the ¢eat (involving both cor- 
rectness of transcription and original correctness of lan- 
guage) and the question of inspiration are very different 
things, demanding very different methods of argument. 
They have a conection with each other, but are in most 
respects quite distinct. It seems, therefore, an absurdity 
—pace tanti viri—when he talks of “ grammatical faults 
in the Scriptures to which the character of inspiration 
cannot be assigned.” What is all human speech but one 
great imperfection, one great “orammatical fault,” we 
may say, if judged by a standard high enough! What 
is a perfect language, and what is the perfect grammar 
of that language? It is hard answering this question 
now; there was no answer at all to it in the days of 
Ezekiel, when such a thing as Hebrew grammar or a 


NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. 349 


Science of grammar, in any sense, was utterly unknown. 
We may say, too, that there was no critical standard, 
such as might have arisen had there been a great many 
books written in the Hebrew language, forming an ex- 
tensive literature from which there might have been 
compiled a series of critical and grammatical canons. 
Ezekiel alone forms a large part of the old Hebrew liter- 
ature; and if we find in him words or forms that do not 
occur in Isaiah, or in the books of Samuel, he is no more 
to be judged by their standard than they are by his. 
Such unusual words, or forms, become, sometimes, of 
critical importance in determining (very imperfectly) the 
date of a book. Certain peculiarities of language seem 
to point to a later period than others; but this is matter 
of great uncertainty, especially in so scanty a literature 
as that of the Hebrew. Thus, for example, it is still an 
unsettled question whether certain Syraisms or Chalda- 
isms are a mark of a very late, or of a very ancient 
period in Hebrew writing. They occur in the Penta- 
teuch, in Job, in the Historical books, in the Proverbs, 
as well as in Ecclesiastes and the later prophets. On the 
other hand, hardly any other book seems so pure Hebrew 
as that of Nehemiah, which is among the latest of them 
all. It is like some later Greek books, which are more 
correct than the ancient ones, because the writers, living 
in the decline of the language, took more pains to make 
their style conform to some Supposed critical standard. 
What makes M. Guizot’s remark the more strange is 
the fact, that, among the all-sided foes of the Bible, an 
objection to it has been made on grounds that are of the 
directly opposite kind. The wonderful agreement, almost 


850 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


sameness, in the Hebrew language, grammar, and style, 
from Genesis to Malachi, has raised a skeptical query in 
some minds. This is not the case, say they, in any 
modern language. Take two books, one purporting to 
be written in the days of William the Conqueror, the 
other in the time of Elizabeth, yet differing as little in 
their English as the Hebrew of -Malachi from that of 
Moses—we should be very much inclined to regard one 
or the other of them as spurious. The objection would 
be well taken as against our rapidly-changing occidental 
tongues; but we know, on the best historical evidence, 
how different, in this respect, are the Oriental, and, espe- 
cially, the Shemitic languages. The Arabic into which 
our missionaries at Beyrout are now making their admi- 
rable translation of the Bible, is substantially that of the 
Koran, written more than twelve hundred years ago. 
The real wonder, therefore, is that Ezekiel should differ 
so little from David and Isaiah, and not that there should 
be occasionally found in him some varying grammatical 
forms, or some few instances of a peculiar orthography. 
Why did not Prof. Munk, when he was about it, give 
M. Guizot a great many more of these? The Jewish 
Masora, and even the marginal Setzb and Keri (the 
written and the read) as found in most Hebrew Bibles, 
would have given him almost any amount of such varieties 
in spelling. Critics, hostile to the Scriptures, have run 
them up to thousands; and yet it has been most truly re- 
marked that ninety-nine per cent. of these wonderful vari- 
ous readings amount to just about as much as the difference 
between spelling honour or honor, with or without the w. 
The remarks made apply with equal force to what is 


NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. 351 


said by M. Guizot, Jun., in respect to the New Testa. 
ment Greek. There is no standard of grammar about it. 
There was none, in that day, even for Thucydides. 
Judged by some of the later critical authorities, this most 
Attic historian wrote very bad Greek. There are in him 
anakaloutha, and that, too, of a most peculiar kind, such 
as are found in no other Greek writer; there are, in 
other words, sentences unparsable by any consistent sys- 
tem of Syntax. He abounds, in short, in bad grammar, 
as we would unquestionably call it, if we judged him by 
any other standard than his own. So Addison and Swift 
write bad English, according to some of our pedantic 
English Grammar-makers, who, instead of leaving our 
language free to develop itself idiomatically like the 
Greek, have put it into a strait-jacket, and made it so 
that a man cannot now write with comfort or freedom, 
through fear, at every moment, of breaking some of 
their rules. . 

M. Guizot does, indeed, cite a case or two of inde- 
fensible grammatical error; but these are corruptions 
of the text made, doubtless, by copyists, who knew 
hardly anything of the Greek language. “Such faults,” 
says M. Guizot, Jun., “become more numerous and 
grosser the greater the antiquity of the manuscript.” 
He would infer that they would be found “more numer- 
ous and grosser” still until we come up to the original 
writers. This, however, is a very unwarranted inference. 
The most ancient of our present manuscripts do not 
come in sight of that earliest time. They were made in 
the darkest period of Greek literature, when the copyist 
had, to guide him, neither the vernacular or ear familiar- 


352 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


ity of the early writer, nor the accurate learning of the 
modern critic. It was just the time for manuscripts to 
become depraved, and all the evidence, external and 
internal, goes to show it. Such manuscripts are very 
valuable; but we should be thankful that we have other 
means, from the ancient versions and numerous Patristic 
citations, for ascertaining the Greek text. 

I have examined carefully the Hebrew and Greek 
references given by M. Guizot, (a number of which, by 
the way, are wrongly cited,) and could give my views in 
each case, but am afraid that it will take me beyond 
desirable limits. Let me, however, briefly advert to a 
very few. His first example is from Ezekiel vill, 16. 
The word bpvinnwn, there, is a Syriasm, the pronoun 
added as an inflexion of the participle and giving it the 
force of a verb. Ezekiel may have acquired this form 
somewhere in his intercourse with the Chaldeans, and so 
it became a part of his language, which God employed 
as the medium of revelation when he employed the man 
himself, with all his peculiarities of speech and tempera- 
ment, for that high purpose. It is quite common in the 
Syriac, and may be regarded as an elegance in that dia- 
lect; as, in fact, an improvement on the Hebrew, if not 
in itself more ancient. 

Most of the cases that immediately follow are mere 
differences of orthography or of grammatical form, to 
which Ezekiel and Jeremiah had as good a right as 
Isaiah had to the peculiarities he exhibits, and which are 
found nowhere else. 

In the third case cited, Ezekiel xxiii, 44, Professor 
Munk finds a barbarism in the use of niwx, (isshoth,) for 


NOTE TO TITE AMERICAN EDITION. 358 


toomen, instead of the common plural sw, (na-shim.) 
{t might be replied that csshoth, though occurring only 
here, is the regular plural of the common singular fwr, 
which is the regular feminine of the common masculine 
wx, (ésh,) man, as though we should use in English 
man-ess* as the feminine of man, instead of the common 
irregular forms woman and women. But the prophet 
knew better than to do this unless there was some good 
reason for it. His use of the common word pws 
(nashim) everywhere else, and in near connection with 
this very place, should have taught Professor Munk that 
the employment of mwx (ésshoth) could not have come 
either from barbarism or from ignorance of grammar. 
The study of the context reveals a capital reason for this 
regular form, strange simply by reason of its regularity. 
The women here spoken of (Aholah and Aholibah) were 
very bad women; they were women that went after the 
men, mannish women; and so the prophet, not having 
the fear of grammar before his eyes, adapts his language 
to them without ceremony. ‘The common term is too 
respectable, and so he makes an unusual form, using a 
feminine plural termination coming directly from ish, 
(man.) Before this (verse 2) he had called them nashim, 
but now his indignation demands the stranger and 
stronger term with something of paronomasia to make it 
impressive. He styles them pian mwrx, (¢sshoth hazim- 


ma,) “these vile man-women,” 


these “lewd viragos,” 

* This very word maness, or manesse, may be found in the Geneva 
Bible (margin) Gen. ii, 23. Attention to the context there will show that 
there was felt, by the old translator, the same necessity for a peculiar 
expression, to suit a peculiar idea, that led the prophet here to employ 
his anomalous word. 


23 


354 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


just as the Latin word virago is formed from vir in & 
similar manner and with a similar idea. Such is the 
spirit of the passage and such the translation it demands. 
It is a bad case for Professor Munk. This particular 
example is dwelt upon to: show how easy it is to stumble 
in the letter, and how unjust we may be in charging these 
old writers with ignorance and bad grammar. This form 
isshoth occurs but once in the Bible. Had there been 
an extensive Hebrew literature after Ezekiel, it might 
have come into use in similar exigencies of the context, 
and then, if the argument of the critic is of any weight, 
it might have been deemed worthy of inspiration. 

In regard to édvvaretv,, Matthew xvii, 20, the critic is 
right wrong. The word means ¢o be impossible, and 
nothing else. The word pecovpérnua, although denoting, 
as M. Guizot, Jun., says, the meridian or zenith, is cor- 
rectly used (Apocalypse viii, 13, xvi, 6, xix, 17) for the 
mid air. Ht is like the Homeric expression ovpav6h 706, 
(Iliad IT, 3.) 

Revelation xiv, 19, which is cited as “a gross gram- 
matical error,” has, in some manuscripts, T7v Anvov tiv 
peyadaAny in the femmine. But this is probably a cor- 
rection arising from grammatical fastidiousness. The 
older authorities are quite uniform in giving either 
rov péyay in the masculine, as M. Guizot has it, or the 
neuter, T6 péya, which is seemingly more irregular still. 
This last, which is the reading of the Alexandrian, is 
probably the true one. There can be no pretense that 
the writer did not know the gender of Anvoc, for he had 
put the feminine article to it in this very sentence where 
the change so abruptly occurs. Besides, it is used cor- 


NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. 355, 


rectly in every other place, as in verse twenty following, 
and in Revelation xix, 15. The same criticism may be 
made here as on Ezekiel xxiii, 44; the anomaly was not. 
without design. The figure of “the Winepress,” fearful 
as it is, falls short. The writer drops it by changing 
the gender, and simply says 7d péya, “that great ”—illud 
magnum, as De Dieu translates it in the neuter—“ that 
great and fearful thing.” This is very strange Greck, to 
be sure; but then it is a very strange image, and a still 
stranger thought. A writer in Hebrew freely makes 
such cases by an anomaly in gender, or in some other 
way. It is not so clear that this, when carried into the 
New Testament Greek, is evidence of ignorance. A 
Hebraism may be a positive excellence. 

The question which these eritics start involves the 
very possibility of a written revelation using, as it must, 
imperfect human language. “Fear not, thou worm 
Jacob; I hold thee by the hand; I will help thee, saith 
the Lord thy redeemer.” Does the Infinite Mind really 
talk in this style? But there is another question still 
further back. Can ue talk to man at all? Can the 
Infinite reveal himself in any way to us poor finite 
creatures? Then he must come where we are; he must 
come down to us, since we cannot rise to him; he must 
assume, in such revelation, the forms of the finite and 
imperfect, even as Christ took our humam nature with 
all its poverty, all its sinless faults and frailties, without 
at all impairing the glory of the divine. If God speaks 
to us, it must be in our own language, our own rhetoric, 
our-own grammar, poor and defective as they all are. 
Passing by our poor philosophy and our poor science, he. 


356 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


comes still closer to us in our most common and familiar 
forms of speech. In the first place, he takes human lan- 
guage, which at the best is necessarily imperfect; and 
then that, by a sure law of our nature, connects itself 
with human conceptions, human imagery, the flowing 
and changing human knowledge, all of which, though im- 
perfect and to a degree erroneous, do nevertheless, with 
all their imperfections, enter into the very roots of words. 
How else shall he reach us? Had there been a book 
printed on the sky, then indeed difficulties about the 
text might have been avoided; but the others would still 
remain, and without the advantages of a revelation com- 
ing to us through a truly human medium. Had men 
been employed as mere mechanical amanuenses, (their 
own thoughts and conceptions taking no part in the 
process,) it would not have been in fact a revelation to 
men through men, It would not have been the Divine 
in the human. But is not the divinity itself impaired in 
such a process? Not at all, to a right thinking. 
Through Ezekiel’s poor Hebrew, through his bad gram- 
mar—if the critics will have it so—shines the glory of 
God, all the more on account of the difficulties overcome 
in thus reaching at last the far-off, finite soul. The more 
one studies them, the more he sees reason to rejoice in 
the language and manner, as well as in the thought of 
the Scriptures, and to thank God that they have been 
written just as they are. 


THE END. 


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